Shortly after this blog went online, I wrote down a short history of the MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences (MRES) book. Here is an update, just before the 6th edition is published.
It is now exactly 20 years since I met the late Wolfgang Engel from Springer on the fringes of the AGU conference in San Francisco. I discussed with him the idea of writing a book on data analysis in the geosciences, in the style of the classic book Numerical Recipes (Press et al., 2007) with MATLAB. He liked the idea, for various reasons, including the fact that I was trying to cover all areas of data analysis, although I was actually really familiar with the methods in Chapters 5 and 6 of 10..
The book was very successful, although it was full of errors due to the lack of professional proofreading, different from the later editions. The compact courses offered in Potsdam at the time were also always fully booked. This later changed, mainly due to the increasing popularity of Python. When I learnt MATLAB in 1992, nobody knew Python, while MATLAB had been around for more than 15 years. I came from Fortran77, the scripting languages like MATLAB were mostly still young and we had to decide whether to use MATLAB or IDL, while some colleagues with a very high budget used Mathematica.
Who knows how long Python will be around? Will it be replaced by Julia or by something completely new? MATLAB hardly plays a role in academia anymore, we have to fight every year to renew the campus licence. The software is mainly used in the professional sector, where a warranty, IEC code certification and professional support are more important than the fact that the software is open and free. When writing books, I have always appreciated the very professional support of the MathWorks book programme. When I later wrote a Python version of the book, the Python Software Foundation replied that they do not care whether I write a book or not, as long as I do not change the Python logo.
It was similar with the professional support from MathWorks, which I use frequently and really appreciate the 24 hour response time and which is included in every MATLAB licence. Yes, there is professional support FOR Python – but not FROM the Python Software Foundation. When I started writing the Python book, I asked Anaconda Inc. for a quote. The offer was 3500 USD for 10 hours of support for a small academic team like mine. And so Python quickly becomes much more expensive than every MATLAB license.
I’ve just started teaching a course on the books for masters and PhD students again, using three languages MATLAB, Python and Julia. It works very well, I think they like the multilingual teaching! Again, one of the languages may well disappear at some point or they may have to learn a completely different language. I have written a blog post about this and given several talks at conferences e.g. the EGU General Assembly about multilingual teaching.
In any case, what is clearly noticeable is the increasing demand on young geoscientists to use quantitative methods. This is of course a positive development, but it also presents the young scientists with the challenge of acquiring solid knowledge in the use of statistical and numerical methods, in addition to complicated methods of data acquisition, as well as higher programming languages such as MATLAB, Python or Julia. Here in Potsdam we try to convey this in our master courses in Geosciences and in Remote Sensing, Geoinformation and Visualization, in addition to the shortcourses on the books in September every year, which I hope to see you next time!
References
Press, W.H., Teukolsky, S.A., Vetterling, W.T., Flannery, B.P. (2007) Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing, Third Edition. Cambridge University Press (Link).
Trauth, M.H. (2024) MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences – Sixth Edition. Springer International Publishing, 567 p, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57949-3.
Trauth, M.H. (2024) Python Recipes for Earth Sciences – Second Edition. Springer International Publishing, 491 p., https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56906-7.