My university has Matlab installed on unix boxes. I wanted to be able to log into my school account and run matlab with graphical output on my laptop. After some trial and error a friend of mine figured out that all you have to do is add a -X tag to the ssh login command like this:
% ssh -X -l usernameNow all the graphs show up on my local desktop. Of course, you have to be doing this via XDarwin. This may be obvious to a UNIX veteran but I thought it would save other less experienced users some time.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020924052508615