Abstract: Riding in automobiles is one of the riskiest activities we undertake voluntarily. This talk will show how automobile manufactures use mathematics and computers to design the safety systems in their future models. The techniques include simulation, automatic control, numerical solution of ordinary differential equations, and computation of matrix eigenvalues.

Biographical Sketch: Cleve Moler is Chairman and Chief Scientist at The MathWorks. Before abandoning academic life for the computer industry, Moler was a professor for almost 20 years, in Math and in Computer Science, at Michigan, Stanford and New Mexico. He then spent five years with two computer hardware manufacturers, the Intel Hypercube organization and Ardent Computer.

Cleve's professional interests center on numerical analysis and mathematical software. In addition to being the author of the first version of MATLAB, he is one of the authors of the LINPACK and EISPACK scientific subroutine libraries. He is also co-author of three textbooks on numerical methods.