Profile in Courage: Dr. Cleve Moler

For most of the 20th century, complex mathematical computing was locked away behind daunting programming barriers, accessible only to specialized computer scientists willing to write thousands of lines of low-level code. While government agencies and legacy academic institutions burned through taxpayer-funded grants to wrestle with cumbersome computing environments, one innovator saw a better way forward that leveraged market innovation and intellectual property (IP) protections.

The late, great Dr. Cleve Moler didn’t wait for permission from bureaucrats to simplify high-performance technical computing. He took matters into his own hands at great professional risk, and for that, he is most certainly a Profile in Courage.

In the late 1970s, Moler sought to give his students easy access to LINPACK and EISPACK, two sophisticated mathematical software libraries developed through federally supported research. Rather than forcing students to master cumbersome FORTRAN programming, Moler created MATLAB (Matrix Laboratory), an interactive tool that allowed users to perform complex matrix calculations with unprecedented ease. What began as a practical classroom innovation would eventually transform scientific research and engineering around the world.

Recognizing MATLAB’s enormous commercial potential, Moler joined forces with engineers Jack Little and Steve Bangert, who helped transform the original program into a more powerful and versatile computing platform. In 1984, the three founded MathWorks, bringing sophisticated mathematical software to a rapidly expanding market of businesses and research institutions. Their entrepreneurial vision demonstrated how private enterprise could build upon foundational scientific discoveries and deliver powerful new capabilities to consumers.

This was quite the risk for Moler, who was a tenured professor and Department Chair of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. Leaving that career stability to co-found MathWorks in 1984 alongside Jack Little and Steve Bangert meant stepping into an infant PC market where mathematical software was barely recognized as a viable commercial business.

Moler may well have foundered had he not been able to make use of robust IP rights in bringing technical knowledge to the masses. Securing patents for MATLAB’s parallel processing and algorithmic framework provided the legal certainty needed to attract investment and reinvest revenue directly into ongoing research and development. Strong IP protection gave MathWorks the commercial shield it needed to safely commercialize high-level mathematical computing, proving that clear property rights incentivize creators to turn abstract ideas into real-world technological infrastructure.

Throughout his distinguished career, Moler received numerous honors recognizing his contributions to numerical computing, including election to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. Yet his most enduring legacy may be the generations of engineers, scientists, students, and entrepreneurs empowered by the technology he helped create.

At a time when technological progress is often discussed primarily in terms of government programs and public spending, Moler’s remarkable career offers a powerful reminder of the transformative potential of individual ingenuity and private enterprise. By recognizing an unmet need, developing an elegant solution, and helping bring that innovation to the marketplace, Dr. Cleve Moler demonstrated how entrepreneurship can turn sophisticated scientific knowledge into tools that advance entire industries.

For putting his career on the line to make technical computing accessible to the masses through private-sector innovation, Dr. Cleve Moler is undeniably a Profile in Courage.