MathWorks is an American privately held
corporation
A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and ...
that specializes in mathematical computing
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
. Its major products include
MATLAB
MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementa ...
and
Simulink
Simulink is a MATLAB-based graphical programming environment for modeling, simulating and analyzing multidomain dynamical systems. Its primary interface is a graphical block diagramming tool and a customizable set of block libraries. It offers t ...
, which support data analysis and simulation.
History
The company's key product, MATLAB, was created in the 1970s by
Cleve Moler
Cleve Barry Moler is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATL ...
, who was chairman of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico at the time. It was a free tool for academics.
Jack Little, who would eventually set up the company, came across the tool while he was a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford University.
Little and Steve Bangert rewrote the code for MATLAB in C while they were colleagues at an engineering firm. They founded MathWorks along with Moler in 1984, with Little running it out of his house in Portola Valley, California
Portola Valley is a town in San Mateo County, California. Located on the San Francisco Peninsula in the Bay Area, Portola Valley is a small, wealthy community nestled on the eastern slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
History
Portola Valle ...
. Little would mail diskettes in baggies (food storage bags) to the first customers. The company sold its first order, 10 copies of MATLAB, for $500 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
(MIT) in February 1985. A few years later, Little and the company moved to Massachusetts, and Little hired Jeanne O'Keefe, an experienced computer executive, to help formalize the business.[ By 1997, MathWorks was profitable, claiming revenue of around $50 million, and had around 380 employees.]
In 1999, MathWorks relocated to the Apple Hill office complex in Natick, Massachusetts, purchasing additional buildings in the complex in 2008 and 2009, ultimately occupying the entire campus. MathWorks expanded further in 2013 by buying Boston Scientific
Boston Scientific Corporation ("BSC"), incorporated in Delaware, is a biomedical/biotechnology engineering firm and multinational manufacturer of medical devices used in interventional medical specialties, including interventional radiology, i ...
's old headquarters campus, which is near to MathWorks' headquarters in Natick.
By 2018, the company had around 3,000 employees in Natick and said it had revenues of around $900 million.
Products
The company's two lead products are MATLAB
MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementa ...
, which provides an environment for scientists, engineers and programmers to analyze and visualize data and develop algorithms, and Simulink
Simulink is a MATLAB-based graphical programming environment for modeling, simulating and analyzing multidomain dynamical systems. Its primary interface is a graphical block diagramming tool and a customizable set of block libraries. It offers t ...
, a graphical and simulation environment for model-based design
Model-based design (MBD) is a mathematical and visual method of addressing problems associated with designing complex control, signal processing and communication systems. It is used in many motion control, industrial equipment, aerospace, and aut ...
of dynamic systems. MATLAB and Simulink are used in aerospace, automotive, software and other fields. The company's other products include Polyspace
Polyspace is a static code analysis tool for large-scale analysis by abstract interpretation to detect, or prove the absence of, certain run-time errors in source code for the C, C++, and Ada programming languages. The tool also checks source c ...
, SimEvents
SimEvents is a discrete event simulation tool developed by MathWorks. It adds a library of graphical building blocks for modeling queuing systems to the Simulink environment. It also adds an event-based simulation engine to the time-based simula ...
, and Stateflow
Stateflow (developed by MathWorks) is a control logic tool used to model reactive systems via state machines and flow charts within a Simulink model. Stateflow uses a variant of the finite-state machine notation established by David Harel, enabl ...
.
Corporate affairs
Intellectual property and competition
In 1999 the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against MathWorks and Wind River Systems
Wind River Systems, also known as Wind River (trademarked as Wndrvr), is an Alameda, California–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops embedded system and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems software, ...
alleging that an agreement between them violated antitrust laws. The agreement in question stipulated that the two companies agreed to stop competing in the field of dynamic control system design software, with MathWorks alone selling Wind River's Matrixx Software and that Wind River would stop all research and development and sales in that field. Both companies eventually settled with the Department of Justice and agreed to sell the MATRIXx software to a third party. MathWorks had total sales of $200 million in 2001, with dynamic control system design software accounting for half of those sales.
MathWorks's Simulink software was found to have infringed 3 patents from National Instruments
National Instruments Corporation, doing business as NI, is an American multinational company with international operation. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, it is a producer of automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software. C ...
related to data flow diagrams in 2003, a decision which was confirmed by a court of appeal in 2004.
In 2011, MathWorks sued AccelerEyes for copyright infringement in one court, and patent and trademark infringement in another. AccelerEyes accepted consent decrees in both cases before the trials began.
In 2012, the European Commission opened an antitrust investigation into MathWorks after competitors alleged that Mathworks refused to grant licenses to its intellectual property that would allow people to create software with interoperability
Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader defi ...
with its products. The case was closed in 2014.
Logo
The logo represents the first vibrational mode of a thin L-shaped membrane, clamped at the edges, and governed by the wave equation
The (two-way) wave equation is a second-order linear partial differential equation for the description of waves or standing wave fields — as they occur in classical physics — such as mechanical waves (e.g. water waves, sound waves and s ...
, which was the subject of Moler's thesis.[
]
Community
The company annually sponsors a number of student engineering competitions, including EcoCAR
EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge was a yearly competition from 2008 to 2011, that built on the 19-year history of United States Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Vehicle Technology Competitions (AVTC), advanced vehicle tech ...
, an advanced vehicle technology competition created by the United States Department of Energy
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...
(DOE) and General Motors
The General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is the largest automaker in the United States and ...
(GM). MathWorks sponsored the mathematics exhibit at London's Science Museum
A science museum is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, industry and industrial machinery, etc. Modern trends in mu ...
.
In the coding community, MathWorks hosts MATLAB Central, an online exchange where users ask and answer questions and share code. MATLAB Central currently houses around than 145,000 questions in its MATLAB Answers database. The company actively supports numerous academic institutions to advance STEM
Stem or STEM may refer to:
Plant structures
* Plant stem, a plant's aboveground axis, made of vascular tissue, off which leaves and flowers hang
* Stipe (botany), a stalk to support some other structure
* Stipe (mycology), the stem of a mushro ...
education, including giving funding to MIT Open Courseware and MITx.
References
Further reading
*
External links
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Companies based in Natick, Massachusetts
Software companies established in 1984
Software companies based in Massachusetts
1984 establishments in Massachusetts
Software companies of the United States
1984 establishments in the United States
Companies established in 1984