Cleve Moler

Cleve Barry Moler was born in August 1939 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Sources differ on the exact day (Wikipedia gives 17 August, The New York Times obituary gives 19 August). His parents, Murray and Eleanor (Barry) Moler, worked as journalists in Salt Lake City. He had two sisters, Martha and Elizabeth. He arrived at Caltech in 1957, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik, and later described riding the wave of federal research funding that followed.

Moler earned a BS in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1961. There he studied numerical analysis with John Todd and wrote his first programs, in 1959, on a Burroughs computer. Todd encouraged him to go to Stanford University to work with his friend George Forsythe. Moler received his PhD in mathematics from Stanford in 1965 with the thesis "Finite difference methods for the eigenvalues of Laplace's operator." Stanford's computer science department was only founded after he arrived, which is why his degree is in mathematics. He then spent a postdoctoral year (1965 to 1966) at ETH Zurich.

After working for Charles Lawson at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1961 to 1962) and completing his doctorate, Moler spent a postdoctoral year at ETH Zurich. There, with Leslie Fox and Peter Henrici, he wrote the 1967 paper on eigenvalues of elliptic operators whose L-shaped membrane eigenfunction later became the MATLAB logo. He taught at the University of Michigan and then, from 1972, at the University of New Mexico, with a visiting year at Stanford in 1979 to 1980. In total he spent almost 20 years as a professor of mathematics and computer science.

In the 1970s he was one of the authors of EISPACK and LINPACK, Fortran libraries developed at Argonne National Laboratory for matrix eigenvalue and linear equation problems. With Pete Stewart he created the QZ algorithm for the generalized eigenvalue problem.

To give his students easy access to these libraries without Fortran programming, he wrote the first MATLAB (Matrix Laboratory) in Fortran in the late 1970s. In 1984 he co-founded MathWorks with Jack Little and Steve Bangert to commercialize a new C version, PC-MATLAB, which debuted in December 1984 at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Las Vegas. Before joining MathWorks full time in 1989 he worked at Intel's hypercube (supercomputing) division, where he coined the term "embarrassingly parallel," and at Ardent Computer Corporation. At MathWorks he served as chief mathematician and chairman, wrote the Cleve's Corner column and blog, and long edited NA Digest for the numerical analysis community. He also wrote the online books Numerical Computing with MATLAB and Experiments with MATLAB.

Moler was married three times. His marriages to Nancy Martin and Shaaron Kent ended in divorce. He married Patsy Wiser in 2000, and she survived him. He had two daughters, Kathryn and Teresa, from his first marriage and a daughter, Antonia, from his second, as well as two stepdaughters, Carolyn Lupton Franco and Byerly Cline, and two grandchildren. In later life he lived in Saint Michaels, Maryland.

Moler believed numerical methods should be efficient, reliable and available to everyone who needs them. He saw MATLAB as a tool for students and practitioners rather than a grand plan, saying he put into it the things he found useful and that other people turned out to find useful too. Colleagues at SIAM described his conviction that applied mathematics, computer science, engineering and industry belong in close conversation, and he championed the SIAM and MathWorks partnership behind the MathWorks Math Modeling (M3) Challenge for high school students.

MATLAB grew from a 71-word classroom calculator into a global technical computing platform used by millions in aerospace, automotive design, finance, medical imaging, genetics and teaching. Historian Thomas Haigh said Moler made perhaps the biggest contribution of anyone to getting numerical methods actually used. Commentators have noted that MATLAB's design choices were inherited by later array tools used in machine learning. His doctoral students included Jack Dongarra, Charles Van Loan and Alan Cline. The Computer History Museum called him the Mozart of the Matrix.

Member of the National Academy of Engineering (elected 1997) and the National Academy of Sciences (elected 2026). Honorary doctorates from Linköping University, the University of Waterloo (2001) and the Technical University of Denmark (2004). President of SIAM (2007 to 2008) and SIAM Fellow (2009). Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award (2011). IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award (2012). IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2014). Computer History Museum Fellow (2017). ICIAM Industry Prize (2023).

Books include Computer Solution of Linear Algebraic Systems (with George Forsythe, 1967), Computer Methods for Mathematical Computations (with Forsythe and Michael Malcolm, 1977), the LINPACK Users' Guide (with Dongarra, Bunch and Stewart, 1979), Numerical Computing with MATLAB (SIAM, 2004) and Experiments with MATLAB. With Jack Little he wrote "A History of MATLAB" for the ACM HOPL conference proceedings (2020). A matrix computation he designed appears on Mr. Spock's console in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

Moler died on 20 May 2026 at his home in Saint Michaels, Maryland, surrounded by his family. He was 86. His daughter Kathryn Moler told The New York Times the cause was Parkinson's disease. MathWorks, SIAM, the Computer History Museum and colleagues including Jack Dongarra and Walter Gander published tributes. Burial or funeral details were not made public.