On Monday, August 6 at 1:31 a.m. EDT, NASA will attempt the landing of a new planetary rover, named Curiosity, on the surface of Mars.  The Mars Science Laboratory project is managed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, a world-renowned center for robotic space exploration and advanced science and engineering.  JPL recently began a widespread adoption of Maplesoft technology, and Maplesoft’s products are expected to help JPL save...

With the addition of ten new Clickable-Calculus examples to the Teaching Concepts with Maple section of the Maplesoft website, we've now posted 63 of the 154 solved problems in my data-base of syntax-free calculations. Once again, these examples and associated videos illustrate point-and-click computations, but more important, they embody the

My list of problems solved with Clickable-Calculus syntax-free techniques now numbers 154, spread over eight subject areas. Recently, Maplesoft posted to its website 44 of these problems, along with videos of their point-and-click solutions. Not only do these solutions demonstrate Maple functionalities, but they also have a pedagogic message, that is resequencing skills and concepts. They show how Maple can be used to obtain a solution, then show how Maple can be used to implement...

Being easy to use is nice, but being easy to learn with is better. Maple’s ease-of-use paradigm, captured in the phrases “Clickable Calculus” and “Clickable Math” provides a syntax-free way to use Maple. The learning curve is flattened. But making Maple easy to use to use badly in the classroom helps neither student nor instructor.

In the mid to late ‘80s,...

Released today, with over 4500 additions and enhancements, Maple 16 reinforces our track record for consistent innovation and industry leadership in areas like ease of use and symbolic computing performance.

Dr. Gilbert Lai is a mentor for the FIRST Robotics team SWAT 771. He is helping an all girls team from grades 7-12 design a basketball-shooting robot for this year’s annual FIRST Robotics Competition. Dr. Lai is using MapleSim and Maple to help the team understand the principles involved and design their robot. This blog post is part of a series that chronicles the progress of the team.  Posts in the series include:

• Part 1 - ...

Dr. Gilbert Lai is a mentor for the FIRST Robotics team SWAT 771. He is helping an all girls team from grades 7-12 design a basketball-shooting robot for this year’s annual FIRST Robotics Competition. Dr. Lai is using MapleSim and Maple to help the team understand the principles involved and design their robot. This blog post is part of a series that chronicles the progress of the team.  Posts in the series include:

• Part 1 - 

Dr. Gilbert Lai is a mentor for the FIRST Robotics team SWAT 771. He is helping an all girls team from grades 7-12 design a basketball-shooting robot for this year’s annual FIRST Robotics Competition. Dr. Lai is using MapleSim and Maple to help the team understand the principles involved and design their robot. This blog post is part of a series that chronicles the progress of the team.  Posts in the series include:

• Part 1 - 

The directional derivative of a scalar function , computed in the direction u in Cartesian coordinates, is defined by

A recent Tips and Techniques article in the Maple Reporter contained the following five "gems" from my Red Book of Maple Magic. These 'gems' are tricks and techniques for Maple that I've discovered in my years here at Maplesoft. The previous 15 gems have appeared in three other issues of the Reporter, as...

Liquid flowing in a pipeline has inertia.  If a valve at the end of the pipeline suddenly closes, a pressure surge hits the valve, and travels through the pipeline at the speed of sound. The damping effect of fluid friction gradually attenuates the pressure wave.

This phenomenon is called water hammer and can cause damage significant damage, sometimes even rupturing the pipeline.

The pressure wave often produces audible sound. If you’ve ever heard...

National Public Radio in the USA carries Car Talk, a humorous phone-in program in which Tom and Ray Magliozzi (Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers) diagnose and offer solutions for mysterious auto-related maladies. It's an amusing hour on Saturday mornings.

On November 22, Joe Riel posted an implicit differentiation problem that caught my attention. It took the manipulations typically learned in an Advanced Calculus course one step further, but the devices learned in such a course could readily be applied. Joe's solution was expressed in terms of exterior...

The iPad is a very exciting device and it has been gaining broad adoption from our academic and professional customers alike. It was a logical step for us to bring Maple technology to this platform.
 
The Maple Player for iPad is now available in the Apple App Store. It comes bundled with ready-made interactive Maple documents, covering topics like integration, differentiation, computing...

Today we've lost computing pioneer Dennis Ritchie. For those not familiar with Dr. Ritchie, he was the co-inventor of the Unix operating system (with Ken Thompson), and the C programming language (with Brian Kernighan), both of which are an integral part of Maple's history.

When Gaston Gonnet implemented the very first version of the Maple kernel, he wanted to do it in the then-new C language, for the hardware and operating system independence that it provided. Unfortunately,...