Eigenmumbles

Nick Trefethen came to Cornell for a visit yesterday, where he gave two talks. In one talk, he described some computations based on sampling analytic functions around the unit circle; in the other, he demonstrated the Chebfun system Chebfun. I’ve seen variants of the latter talk before, but it was worth seeing again. The philosophy of the talk reminds me of a line from the start of The Wind in the Willows, in which the Water Rat tells Mole:

Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

Replace “boats” with “MATLAB”, and I think you have the raison d’être for Chebfun. This is not to say that Chebfun couldn’t be used to serious ends, but rather that it’s great fun to mess about with it; and Trefethen conveys that sense of fun masterfully.