I am using a link with Matlab and I want to call upon matlab to do determinants of matrices for me in a procedure.

For example say i wanted to get the determinant of

a:=([1,z],[1,z^2]), when I put this into maple with Matlab[det](a) I get error in Matlab:setvar unable to store 'Re(z)' when data type=float[8].

Any idea how to fix this error?

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks!