In 1988, Keith Geddes and others involved with the Maple project at the University of Waterloo published a Maple Calculus Workbook of interesting calculus problems and their solutions in Maple. Over the years, I've paged through this book, extracting some of its more unique problems. Recently, I extracted the following problem from this book, and added it to my Clickable Calculus collection, which I use for workshops and web-based presentations.

Go Habs Go!

Three recent articles in the Tips & Techniques series addressed the question of stepwise solutions in Maple. Just what is it that Maple provides by way of stepwise solutions for standard calculations in the mathematical curricula? There are commands, assistants, tutors, and task templates that provide stepwise calculations in precalculus, calculus, linear algebra, and vector calculus. In addition, since Maple can implement nearly any mathematical operation, any stepwise calculation can be reproduced in Maple by assembling the appropriate intermediate steps, just as they would be assembled when working with pencil and paper.

The HDF5 file format offers a lot of advantages for data management, particularly with large scientific datasets.  It is provided by the HDF Group [http://www.hdfgroup.org/].  MATLAB and R have routines to load datasets from HDF5 files into memory.  It would be great to have the same capability in Maple.  Has any work be done to import and export Maple data and HDF5?

Last week, I announced that the new MaplePrimes was going to be launched this week. Unfortunately, that won't be the case. The reason is that we will be powering the search on new Primes with our Google Mini. Unfortunately, the influx of all of the new Primes content and online help content caused us to fill up the hard drive on the server that Maplesoft currently owns.

I have to thank my friend John Wass, an editor from Scientific Computing magazine who began a recent article with the clear warning “Attention Engineers! The developers at Maplesoft rarely sit still for very long.”  This was a comment on the thrilling speed that enhancements are flowing from the MapleSim pipeline. Although his quote refers to a MapleSim 3 article he wrote, I chuckled as the sentiment still rings true as my colleagues and I catch our breaths after the recent release of MapleSim 4.  Yes, the engineering community has definitely taken notice that MapleSim, in such a short amount of time, is already making a big difference in the way we do and think about modeling.

The MaplePrimes community continues to provide very helpful feedback about how well the product is working (and how well it isn’t!).  Thank-you.  We always appreciate your taking the time to report these problems so we can make our products better.  Maple 14 includes several fixes that were made specifically in response to reports made from MaplePrimes, including improvements in:
•    Polygon plots
•    StringTools
•    fsolve
•    Density plots
•    Operator overloading
•    Typesetting involving mods in 2-D math
•    Extensions to DocumentTools[Do] for programmatic refresh of components
•    Searching online help

It appears this has come up quite a number of times (I have even wished this option existed for some of my worksheets).

There is no option to set the pixel size of a window for the plot as an option.  You must use your cursor to adjust the size of your window.  Even globally set the window size as I believe someone has mentioned before would also be a nice addition.

At the end of the blog MRB constant 

Our solar system was created in three hours… well, at least that was how long it took for me to create a model of it in MapleSim. This process started out as an inquiry from a MapleSim user asking if MapleSim can be used to model planetary motions, through the use of Newton’s law of gravity. I view this kind of inquiry as both a challenge (any time someone asks “can MapleSim do such and such” it is an automatic invitation for us Applications Engineers to try it out J ), and an opportunity to learn new things.

While I am somewhat fascinated by astronomy (who isn’t dazzled by all of those pretty photos of various celestial bodies in the universe?!), I have never developed a keen interest in it.  That can be partially attributed to the fact that I grew up in a city that never sleeps, which means serious light pollution (I didn’t realize how beautiful the night sky was and how bright the stars can be until my teenage years on a family camping trip…  but that’s another story). The aspect of astronomy that I understand tells me that the law of gravity applies, to a certain extent, and that the magnitude of the numeric values that we are dealing with (for planetary motion simulation) is astronomical! So for me, these are the two key issues that will need to be addressed when creating a MapleSim model.

Sometimes the obvious escapes me, and it’s only due to some chance observation that I realize the same fundamental principles are everywhere.

A short time ago, I created a simple hydraulic network in MapleSim, and after experimenting with some of the parameters, found it gave the same behaviour as an electric circuit I’d modeled earlier.

with(plots):
a:=[2.5,2.5,2.5,2.5,5,2.5,2.5,2.5,2.5];
b:=Matrix(3,3,a);
matrixplot(b)

Two corners have been drawn differently.  Shouldn't it be symmetric?  This appears to be a bug

Here's one view showing the sides cut away

and the other view of the other corners, rotated 90 degrees, to show what it should look like.

This is a view I would expect to see all around however the corner in the forefront and the one you can't see have been cut away as I've shown in the rotated view above.

I thought of a couple of new forum subtopics ... just an idea

Maple training beginner to advanced
 - not sure of the formalities here but this could be sub-forum-topic where one could go to get a better grasp of using maple however I think that comes with time anyways, as I said just a thought.  Lots of tutorials out there that do similar things anyways.

Using Maple in interesting ways
- This would be a subforum where users could post their finished projects.

Maple has been able to solve linear programnming (LP) problems since Release 9 with Optimization[LPSolve]. This is a very important feature for people who are interested in optimization applications. However, as far as I know, LPSolve only provides the final optimal solution, but does not give any sensitivity analysis results.

I believe that LP solutions without sensitivity analysis are not very useful since one needs to compute the dual prices for resources, optimality ranges for objective function coefficients, etc.

It's funny that multiplication of a single number works on a list for each element but addition does not work the same way.

a:=[1,2,3]

3*a;
       [3,6,9]

3+a;
 error

You have to use zip(`+`,3,a) for it to work.  Is there not a simple way.  Why is that?