In Windows, MATLAB R14's FIGURE behaviour can be annoying. Namely, whenever we invoke figure/figure(X), it immediately jumps to the foreground, and steals focus from whatever other window was active, preventing you from switching to other processes, the MATLAB editor window, etc... (if you are repeatedly switching between figures/displaying results in a loop). This wrapper to figure makes FIGURE silent -- ie. if you had figure X in the background, then the call figure(X) will keep that figure in the background.