“Numerical analysis has always been the black sheep of mathematics. I like to say that mathematics is the art of avoiding computation. In pure mathematics if you have to do a computation then it’s because your model is not sophisticated enough, or not elegant enough, or you haven’t got the right abstraction. It was just different, it was a new subject and most of the mathematicians at Stanford, I’d say, were happy to see it get out of the department and go its own way elsewhere.”
Cleve Moler, cofounder of MathWorks