Post by Simon Adelman

The The New York Times wrote a lovely obituary for Cleve Moler, founder and Chief Scientist of MathWorks who sadly died earlier this month. In the last few paragraphs it also includes one of the best correction notes I've ever seen... 👇 "Dr. Moler’s work may have changed the world, although its highly technical nature meant that it, and he, were far from household names. But anyone who has seen the first “Star Trek” film, released in 1979, has gotten a glimpse of it. During filming, the producers asked the Los Alamos National Laboratory for accurate computer graphics to run on a display at Mr. Spock’s console. The lab gave them film showing the results of a matrix computation, designed by Dr. Moler, appearing as jagged peaks on a square. It’s visible over Mr. Spock’s shoulder, just as the starship Enterprise enters a nebula in search of an evil superintelligent cloud called V’Ger. Corrected on June 11, 2026: An earlier version of this obituary misidentified the starship Enterprise crew member Spock as a doctor. He did not have a medical degree or a doctorate, and should have been referred to as Mister."