Cleve Moler has died at age 86.  He invented Matlab and founded The Mathworks with Jack Little in 1984.  He was DSP's version of a Manhattan Project mathematician.  

When I was an RF Engineer in the late 1980's, I needed a tool for DSP design.  I asked around, and eventually stumbled upon Matlab.  As an analog designer, I probably never would have gotten into DSP without it.  The great thing about Matlab was that you could be a neophyte in digital logic and signal processing, but still learn DSP design.  So thank you, Cleve Moler.

I'm sorry to read this.

I had one phone conversation with Cleve in the 1990s.  Needless to say we did not agree about the main topic (the hardwired 1-origin indexing in MATLAB).

Hah!  If I had a nickel for every time I used the assignment:

n = 0:N-1;

I would have a lot of nickels.  I guess nobody's perfect.

For me, I don't like the DC component coming out of an FFT to be x(1).  If you use max() or min() or find() and you get an index for a spectral peak or some feature, you must remember to subtract 1 from that index before doing other math with it.

I wanted this fixed 30 years ago.  Cleve didn't agree.  Now this 1-origin indexing is entrenched in MATLAB.  I consider that to be "sad".

As they say, the worst mistake in any new venture is made on the first day.  But, in the spirit of eulogy, look at all the stuff he got right!

Perhaps by his reckoning, he was 87 years old?

:)

His "Nineteen Dubious Ways to Compute the Exponential of a Matrix" paper is a classic

He also wrote a book, Numerical Computing with Matlab, SIAM, 2004.  This book has some good nuggets in it, but many of the chapters are -- no surprise --pretty heavy on math.