From The Economist:
Yes, they did a MATLAB simulation in demographics, for real.
Between 1974 and 1996, Bangladesh turned a district ... into a giant demographic experiment: some villages and households got family planning, others did not. According to one study of the results, fertility in the areas that received help declined by around 15% more than in those that did not. And over the two decades of the experiment, indicators of the well-being of women and their chidren--health, earnings, household assets and so on--were all higher in the villages that got the planning.The name of the district? Matlab.
Yes, they did a MATLAB simulation in demographics, for real.