MATLAB is computer programming language developed by Mathworks for scientific computing. There are many software toolboxes available from Mathworks and other sources that provide additional functionality needed to solve problems in a wide range of disciplines such as Computational biology, Image and video processing, Optimization, Partial differential equations, Signal processing and communications, Statistics and data analysis.

Matlab is a high-level language for numerical computation, visualization and application development. It also provides an interactive environment for iterative exploration, design and problem solving. It provides vast library of mathematical functions for linear algebra, statistics, Fourier analysis, filtering, optimization, numerical integration and solving ordinary differential equations.

Cleve Moler, the chairman of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico, started developing MATLAB in the late 1970s. He designed it to give his students access to LINPACK and EISPACK without them having to learn Fortran. It soon spread to other universities and found a strong audience within the applied mathematics community. Jack Little, an engineer, was exposed to it during a visit Moler made to Stanford University in 1983. Recognizing its commercial potential, he joined with Moler and Steve Bangert. They rewrote MATLAB in C and founded MathWorks in 1984 to continue its development. These rewritten libraries were known as JACKPAC.In 2000, MATLAB was rewritten to use a newer set of libraries for matrix manipulation, LAPACK. MATLAB was first adopted by researchers and practitioners in control engineering, Little’s specialty, but quickly spread to many other domains. It is now also used in education, in particular the teaching of linear algebra, numerical analysis, and is popular amongst scientists involved in image processing.

MATLAB has several advantages over other methods or languages: Its basic data element is the matrix. A simple integer is considered an matrix of one row and one column. Several mathematical operations that work on arrays or matrices are built-in to the Matlab environment.

MATLAB stands for Matrix Laboratory and the software is built up around vectors and matrices. This makes the software particularly useful for linear algebra but MATLAB is also a great tool for solving algebraic and differential equations and for numerical integration.

A proprietary programming language developed by Math Works, MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, Java, Fortran and Python.

Simulink, developed by Math Works, is a graphical programming environment for modeling, simulating and analyzing multi-domain dynamic systems. Its primary interface is a graphical block diagramming tool and a customizable set of block libraries.

MATLAB stands for Matrix Laboratory. Cleve Moler is a mathematician and computer programmer. In the mid to late 1970s, he invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to Fortran libraries for numerical computing without writing Fortran.