Fun with matrices

I did some work with Octave (the GNU variant of Matlab) last night. I performed one of the exercises in book "Engineering Problem Solving with Matlab". It was fun, working on a new tool and on a problem different from the normal work-day problems.

I found one difference in the book's description of Matlab and the performance of Octave, and that was in the zeros() function. This might be due to a difference between Octave and Matlab, or a difference in a later version of Octave (and a later version of Matlab), or possibly an error in the book. Solving this challenge and seeing the plot come out was the most fun of the exercise.