Introduction MATLAB is an interactive, matrix-based system for scientic and engineering numeric computation and visualization. You can solve complex numerical problems in a fraction of the time required with a programming language such as Fortran or C. The name MATLAB is derived from MATrix LABoratory. The purpose of this Primer is to help you begin to use MATLAB. It is not intended to be a substitute for the User’s Guide and Reference Guide for MATLAB. The Primer can best be used hands-on. You are encouraged to work at the computer as you read the Primer and freely experiment with examples. This Primer, along with the on-line help facility, usually suce for students in a class requiring use of MATLAB. You should liberally use the on-line help facility for more detailed information. When using MATLAB, the command help functionname will give information about a specic function. For example, the command help eig will give information about the eigenvalue function eig. By itself, the command help will display a list of topics for which on-line help is available; then help topic will list those specic functions under this topic for which help is available. The list of functions in the last section of this Primer also gives most of this information. You can preview some of the features of MATLAB by rst entering the command demo and then selecting from the options oered. The scope and power of MATLAB go far beyond these notes. Eventually you will want to consult the MATLAB User’s Guide and Reference Guide. Copies of the complete documentation are often available for review at locations such as consulting desks, terminal rooms, computing labs, and the reserve desk of the library. Consult your instructor or your local computing center to learn where this documentation is located at your institution. MATLAB is available for a number of environments: Sun/Apollo VAXstation/HP workstations, VAX, MicroVAX, Gould, PC and AT compatibles, 80386 and 80486 com- puters, Apple Macintosh, and several parallel machines. There is a relatively inexpensive Student Edition available from Prentice Hall publishers. The information in these notes applies generally to all of these environments. MATLAB is licensed by The MathWorks, Inc., 24 Prime Park Way, Natick, MA 01760, (508)653-1415, Fax: (508)653-2997, Email: info@mathworks.com. 1. Accessing MATLAB. On most systems, after logging in one can enter MATLAB with the system command matlab and exit MATLAB with the MATLAB command quit or exit. However, your local installation may permit MATLAB to be accessed from a menu or by clicking an icon. On systems permitting multiple processes, such as a Unix system or MS Windows, you will nd it convenient, for reasons discussed in section 14, to keep both MATLAB and your local editor active. If you are working on a platform which runs processes in multiple windows, you will want to keep MATLAB active in one window and your local editor active in another. You should consult your instructor or your local computer center for details of the local installation. 2. Entering matrices. MATLAB works with essentially only one kind of object|a rectangular numerical matrix with possibly complex entries; all variables represent matrices. In some situations, 1-by-1 matrices are interpreted as scalars and matrices with only one row or one column are interpreted as vectors…

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