Background

After seven months of arduous negotiations about topics ranging from terms and conditions, to information security and accessibility practices, MathWorks and the CSU signed a four-year system-wide agreement for MATLAB, the world’s leading computational platform for engineering, scientific and mathematical applications. MATLAB’s Total Academic Headcount (TAH) enterprise license model provides signatory campuses in the CSU open and unlimited access to more than 83 modules for teaching, learning and research in a wide range of disciplines. The CSU joins more than 800 universities worldwide that have chosen the TAH license, providing their faculty, researchers and students unlimited license to the full suite of MATLAB products. In the words of an electrical engineering faculty at Cal Poly Pomona, “there is God, engineering and MATLAB,” indicating the absolute dominance of MATLAB as a standard computational tool in engineering education. Faculty and students (including on their personal computers) at these 14 CSU campuses now have unfettered access to the level of computational, simulation and visualization tools that are standard in most engineering programs, and increasingly in the science and business programs.

This CSU-MathWorks agreement represents a partnership and perhaps a shared vision between the largest higher education system in the US and the premier developer and mathematical computing software for engineers and scientists with the promise of supporting of student learning and research through computational modelling.