Practical 1: Introduction to MATLAB

Elementary Mathematical Functions

MATLAB has a number of built-in functions, such as square root, sine, cosine, exponential, etc, functions. The following table gives a list of some commonly used functions. Later you will also write your own functions.

round(x)	Rounds $x$ to the nearest integer
floor(x)	Rounds $x$ down to nearest integer
ceil(x)	Rounds $x$ up to nearest integer
rem(y,x)	Remainder after dividing $y$ by $x$ (eg remainder of 17/3 is 2)
sign(x)	Returns -1 if $x$ ; returns 0 if $x=0$ ; returns 1 if $x>0$ .
rand or rand(1)	Generates a random number between 0 and 1
exp(x)	Exponential function $e^{x}$
log(x)	Natural logarithm function, $y= \ln x$ (where $e^{y} = x$ )
sqrt(x)	Square root function, $\sqrt{x}$
abs(x)	Absolute value function, $\left\|x\right\|$
sin(x)	sine function $\sin x$
cos(x)	cos function $\cos x$
tan(x)	tan function $\tan x$