Mathematics is used in almost every field of knowledge. It is a necessary tool in engineering, physics, science, finance, biology, chemistry, and accounting, to name a few. Every day, new disciplines emerge that require massive computational effort. We can mention Artificial Intelligence as an example of them. Mathematics is taught at all levels of education, from kindergarten and elementary school to college and graduate school. Thus, most people have a fairly good knowledge of some area of mathematics. Unfortunately, most students and mathematics users are not taught using mathematics software tools like MATLAB R 1 , among other similar tools such as Mathematica and MathCAD, which allow users to solve mathematics problems when they arise in their corresponding fields of expertise. The purpose of this handbook is to allow mathematics users to learn and master the mathematics software package MATLAB.
MATLAB integrates computation, visualization, and programming to produce a powerful tool for a number of different tasks in mathematics. MATLAB is the acronym for MATrix LABoratory. In MATLAB, every mathematical
variable or quantity is treated in matrix form. With MATLAB, we can perform complex mathematical tasks with relatively simple programs. This is possible because MATLAB has close to 10,0000
built-in functions, from simple ones such as differentiation, integration, and
plotting, to optimization functions which require no user programming.