Page 43 - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users

24 Chapter 2: MATLAB Basics

The result is a 3 × 1 matrix, in other words, a column vector.
MATLABhas many commands for manipulating matrices. You can read
about them in the section More about Matrices in Chapter 4 and in the online
help; some of them are illustrated in the section Linear Economic Models in
Chapter 9.

Suppressing Output

Typing a semicolon at the end of an input line suppresses printing of the
output of the MATLAB command. The semicolon should generally be used
when defining large vectors or matrices (such as X = -1:0.1:2;). It can
also be used in any other situation where the MATLAB output need not be
displayed.

Functions

In MATLAB you will use bothbuilt-in functions as well as functions that you
create yourself.

Built-in Functions

MATLAB has many built-in functions. These include sqrt, cos, sin, tan,
log, exp, and atan (for arctan) as well as more specialized mathematical
functions suchas gamma, erf, and besselj. MATLAB also has several built-
√
in constants, including pi (the number π), i (the complex number i = −1),
and Inf (∞). Here are some examples:
>> log(exp(3))

ans =
3

The function log is the natural logarithm, called “ln” in many texts. Now
consider

>> sin(2*pi/3)

ans =
0.8660