Matlab is software designed to perform calculations with matrices (Matlab = Matrix Laboratory). MATLAB was created in the late 1970s by Cleve Moler, then chairman of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico.

It soon spread to other universities and found strong use within the applied mathematics community. Jack Little, an engineer, got to know the MATLAB language during a visit by Moler to Stanford University in 1983.

Recognizing its commercial potential, he joined Moler and Steve Bangert. They rewrote MATLAB in C, founded MathWorks in 1984 and continued its development. The rewritten libraries became known as LAPACK.

MATLAB was first adopted by control design engineers, Little's specialty, and quickly spread to other fields of application. It is now also used in education, especially the teaching of linear algebra and numerical analysis, and is very popular with scientists involved in image processing.