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.

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.