Cleve Moler’s passing last night was announced today. I wanted to share some personal thoughts.
Nick Trefethen bought MATLAB’s first commercial license at MIT in 1985, and I was its first user. Cleve has been a friend ever since. He liked to remember a train ride in the 1990s from Copenhagen where we ran MATLAB contests on early Unix laptops. We crossed paths often over the years — Red Sox games, conferences, long conversations whenever we found ourselves in the same place, including hours on Nick’s couch at his Oxford retirement in 2023. That’s the Cleve I’ll always hold onto.
People sometimes saw a rivalry between us once Julia came along. The truth is that the respect always went both ways, and mattered far more than any of that.
Cleve was a hero. He knew long before LLMs let us program in English that software should not stand in the way of computation.
There is so much I could say about Cleve — enough for many posts, not one. For now I’ll say only this: the field of Numerical Linear Algebra’s central gathering is the Householder Symposium, which began in 1961. The twenty-second was held at Cornell this past summer. Cleve had missed only four. At Cornell he remarked that the field was in good hands. We will try to deserve it — in numerical linear algebra, and in numerical computing more broadly.
Thinking of Patsy, the family, and the many who knew and admired Cleve, the person, today.
Alan