A true giant. His algorithm for Pythagorean addition, which computes sqrt(a^2 + b^2) without taking square roots, is a wonderful gem.

Fun anecdote about early Matlab. In the '80s, while in high school, I "acquired" the source code of an early version of matlab, similar to the one that you linked. An email from Cleve Moler in 1990 asked people not to distribute the code, so I didn't give it to anybody. In the late '90s I visited Cleve Moler at his Mathworks office, and he proudly showed the early Matlab running on DOS, remarking that he only had that binary but had lost the source code. So I gave it to him.

I haven't realized MATLAB was that old. It's one of the earliest software for PC yet still almost without alternative for engineers in 2026.

MATLAB competed in the same space with a piece of software called GAUSS. Both had their initial commercial release in 1984. MATLAB eventually went on to dominate most areas, but I had to deal with the pain of writing my dissertation in GAUSS, which continues to be heavily used in specific areas today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAUSS_(software)

I didn’t know his name but certainly knew about MATLAB. He sounds worthy of a black bar to me.

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