useful functions

Matlab has a lot of built-in functions. To use a function, just type functionname(arguments) with the appropriate name and arguments. If you create a time vector t=1:.25:6; you can get standard functions like

x = sin(t)

which returns a vector the same size as t, with values for the sin of t at all points. You can also do things like

s = sum(c)

which sums all the columns in a matrix c and returns a row vector of the sums. The function d = det(c)

takes a matrix c and returns the determinant of it. The matlab booklet has a list of many of these useful functions.