I was reading about MATLAB and I'm so much curious on it. But I have some questions:
I know that the name of the language is very subjective, but I want to show for all that these languages used only for maths and statictics can do powerful things in maths and in other categorys too.
For starters, you can look at all the categories of user-created files that have been submitted on the MathWorks File Exchange. That gives a pretty good snapshot of the sorts of things people have used it for. Here's the list of general categories that the over 10,000 code submissions are divided into:
Hi
Well, since maths IS everything, then a system to do maths can do everything (that's just an opinion of course). Here's a partial list of toolboxes for Matlab -- if any of them are not maths according to your definition then yes Matlab can do something(s) other than maths ...
-- Signal Processing
-- Image Processing
-- Optimization
-- Mapping
-- Partial Differential Equations
-- Neural Networks
-- Bioinformatics
-- Genetic Algorithms
See the Mathworks site for links to code.
Regards
Mark
This website has some good information about MATLAB programming that doesn't involve math, including several games. http://www.mathtools.net/MATLAB/Games/index.html
MATLAB alone may not have a lot of obvious applications for other fields, but MATLAB has many add-on toolboxes that greatly extend its capabilities. For instance, you can use Simulink to design a drive-by-wire control system for an automobile, then use either Real-Time Workshop or TargetLink to generate C code that will run on the car's ECU.
Mathematics is a necessary foundation for a huge number of things that you may not think of as explicitly mathematics. Image processing, engineering, chemistry, physics, simulation in many forms, etc.
As an example, I am a bridge player. Frequently I had a desire to generate sets of random bridge hands to test out bidding systems. Yes, there are tools out there to do this, but I wanted my own. It was a matter of little effort to write a tool (with a gui interface) that can generate random bridge hands that satisfy a given set of constraints on the hand. It can be set to generate the probability a given hand type will result, or just generate a large set of hands for bidding practice.
Of course, all of these things can be said of many of the languages used out there, not only MATLAB. The point is if you understand the system that you wish to work with, and the computational tool you have at hand, many things can be done. For example, years ago I was given the task of solving a coupled system of nonlinear partial differential equations over a circular domain to solve an engineering problem. I had a spreadsheet available to me. So I wrote the solution in Excel. It worked.
It depends how you look at it. In the end all it does is maths - moving around ones and zeroes back and forth ...