Max Born was a remarkable mathematician who soon saw that the equation that Heisenberg had given him was a sort of recipe for writing a matrix. Dr. Born was one of the few people at that time who was interested in this odd kind of math that most people figured was not good for very much. He knew that matrices could be multiplied, so doing all the calculations for accounting for one physics problem could be handled by multiplying one matrix by another. Just being able to put a complicated procedure into a standard and acceptable form would make it easier to work with. It might also make it easier for other people to accept.