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Most engineers use MATLAB. Most scientists don't. Chemistry adopts it a bit more, but if a scientist is using it, chances are they are actually solving an eng

Most engineers use MATLAB. Most scientists don't. Chemistry adopts it a bit more, but if a scientist is using it, chances are they are actually solving an engineering problem or just making a plot, and not performing data analysis or simulation.

keypusher 15y ago
Dunno where you got that idea. I used to work in an fMRI lab at MIT. We would put people in a brain scanner and have them do some tasks. After, we had a timeseries of very high resolution 3-D blood flow images in the brain (these are basically matrices with a number for the value in each voxel). Then we ran data analysis. I'm talking a multi-stage data analysis using different statistical techniques for motion correction, normalization, modeling the haemodynamic response function, slice timing correction and lining all this up with the time data for the tasks, then doing whole group analysis. This generally ran on a 12 node Linux cluster we had in house and typical analysis could take hours or days. Up until recently, MATLAB dominated the research in this field, but now everyone is moving to Python, or wrapping existing programs in Python. Anyway, it's not only engineers that use MATLAB. It is quite popular in the sciences, and not just for plotting.
- juiceandjuice 15y ago
  Well this sort of thing especially is where MATLAB shines (i.e. Matrix processing, Signal Analysis, hence MATrix LABaratory), especially with 3D FFTs like you'd do with fMRIs. So that's fine, but once you start getting into Monte Carlo simulations and massive batch processing, event filtering, instrument calibration, and all your database connections and all sorts of other stuff, it honestly just doesn't scale up or provide a complete solution. So you end up doing some in MATLAB, some in C, some bash scripts, some in whatever else. Python gives the flexibility at all stages to solve all that in one or two languages (C/C++ for optimization, python for everything else). I do know chemists that use MATLAB, but not the computational chemists on the big clusters. Most the solid state physicists I know use OriginLab, LabView and even Maple or Mathematica all on Windows and proprietary stuff like that, usually because they are hooking up to various instruments. Even R has been more popular with the physicists I know than MATLAB. Maybe this is all just a big anecdote, but I also work in scientific computing as well, and this has been my experience.

keypusher 15y ago

Dunno where you got that idea. I used to work in an fMRI lab at MIT. We would put people in a brain scanner and have them do some tasks. After, we had a timeseries of very high resolution 3-D blood flow images in the brain (these are basically matrices with a number for the value in each voxel). Then we ran data analysis. I'm talking a multi-stage data analysis using different statistical techniques for motion correction, normalization, modeling the haemodynamic response function, slice timing correction and lining all this up with the time data for the tasks, then doing whole group analysis. This generally ran on a 12 node Linux cluster we had in house and typical analysis could take hours or days. Up until recently, MATLAB dominated the research in this field, but now everyone is moving to Python, or wrapping existing programs in Python. Anyway, it's not only engineers that use MATLAB. It is quite popular in the sciences, and not just for plotting.

juiceandjuice 15y ago
Well this sort of thing especially is where MATLAB shines (i.e. Matrix processing, Signal Analysis, hence MATrix LABaratory), especially with 3D FFTs like you'd do with fMRIs. So that's fine, but once you start getting into Monte Carlo simulations and massive batch processing, event filtering, instrument calibration, and all your database connections and all sorts of other stuff, it honestly just doesn't scale up or provide a complete solution. So you end up doing some in MATLAB, some in C, some bash scripts, some in whatever else. Python gives the flexibility at all stages to solve all that in one or two languages (C/C++ for optimization, python for everything else). I do know chemists that use MATLAB, but not the computational chemists on the big clusters. Most the solid state physicists I know use OriginLab, LabView and even Maple or Mathematica all on Windows and proprietary stuff like that, usually because they are hooking up to various instruments. Even R has been more popular with the physicists I know than MATLAB. Maybe this is all just a big anecdote, but I also work in scientific computing as well, and this has been my experience.