Cool examples of how Matlab is useful

I teach a little side course on using Matlab, and I'd like to show a little demo of how Matlab is used in research and industry. I'm wondering if any of you have any neat examples you can provide from your own work or from other (freely available) work.

For example, I plan to show them videos of fluid mechanics simulations I've worked with. I'm looking for stuff with nice colour and nice visuals, but also with a serious tone. It doesn't have to be interactive, but videos or animations are great. If the code is available and it can be run in real time, this would be even better.

Examples from the physical applied sciences would be great, but I'm also interested in other examples from things like graph theory, networks, coding theory, etc.

The most important thing is that it shouldn't be half-baked examples.

[Jan]

Who could decide, if a code is half-baked?

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Have you seen the File Exchange: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/

[Jan]

@Theo: The FileExchange is a very good advice. I do not think, that you can get example code from the industry for free. You are looking for "serious" stuff with "nice colors"? This sounds like a contradiction and reminds me to the demonstrations of the power of computers we see on television: Even the finger print comparison is performed by displaying photos of fingertips with a frequency of 15Hz - hilarious!

[Theo]

@Jan:

> You are looking for "serious" stuff with "nice colors"? This sounds like a contradiction.

Why is that a contradiction? Does serious science have to be ugly? There are plenty of examples of Matlab implementations in which the researcher has gone to great lengths to make it beautiful. For example, The Schwartz-Christoffel toolbox, that solves for conformal mappings from one geometry to another; the built-in PDE toolbox can solve PDEs at the click of a button and show, for example, the distribution of heat in a heated geometry; the open source IFISS package allows people to use Matlab to solve incompressible flow problems.

I plan to show some of these to the students. I think these are all examples of "serious" stuff with "nice colors". How is that a contradiction?

What I was hoping was for people to provide suggestions along the same lines, especially for applications in other scientific fields. Thank you for suggesting the FileExchange; I will have a closer look, but it will help for people who specialize in the different fields to help me whittle things down.

[Jan]

"Serious" applications do not use colors to be "nice", but to improve the scientific power of the visualized results. E.g. a colored 3D animation can be perfect to show the results of simulating a multi-body system. Therefore I admit, that "nice" and "serious" is not necessarily a contradiction. While "stuff with nice colour, but also with a serious tone" seemed to mean a preference of fancy optics, your comment above stresses your real scientific interest.

Some FileExchange submissions are reviewed, see http://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/ and do not miss to look at the "previous Entries" links.

Answer 2

[Matt Fig]

I would humbly submit this code I wrote for my M.S. in Mechanical Engineering. It calculates the resonant frequencies and plots the resonant modes of solid objects of different shapes and material composition.

Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy

Also, here is one to show that MATLAB can be fun!

MATLAB Tetris

[Theo]

Thank you very much. This looks great and I'll see if I can say a few words about it.

[Matt Fig]

I've been told that the RUS program doesn't display properly on some systems (I wrote most of that code 7 years ago in ver 6.5 and 7.1!). I plan to submit an update soon. If it doesn't look like the sample image when you run it, I can send you the updated version that does work cross modern platforms via email. Here is what it should look like (note the plots show the resonant modes fairly clearly, and the uicontrols have clear text labels):

RUS Program and Plots