I just wanted to let you know that our recent webinar with IEEE & NI, “Accelerating the Model-based Development & Enabling HIL Testing for Mechatronic Systems” is now available on demand through IEEE’s website. If you would like to learn more about the webinar or if you would like to (re)watch, click here.

The new version of MaplePrimes is rapidly approaching the finish line and I am happy to announce that we will be launching it to a group of Beta testers (edit: the Beta program is now live).  A reminder that if you would like to participate in the Beta, please send me a private message and I will add you to the list.  For those who have already asked to participate, thank you.  Everyone will receive a message tomorrow with details about how to access the Beta site.

The bloggers at Maplesoft.com have been busy recently, and we've seen the addition of some great new posts.  Here are some links if you're interested.

Recently, I received an email from a physics instructor asking for help in building a tool that would display the solution of the initial value problem 

with the four parameters under the control of sliders. (Of course, we recognize that this equation governs the damped, driven linear oscillator, and that the request to endow its solution with sliders is in service of visualization of the change in the nature of the solution as the parameters vary.)

Something's wrong with the file upload feature. Look at my list of files; it now shows at least three copies of the same file, two from this morning (and the original one from some days ago). The first copy is fine. The last two are supposed to be a different file (p1.gif). I can select this file through the file browser, but that file is not the one that is uploaded. All I get is another copy of the last file I uploaded.

This looks like it's a bug in the MaplePrimes system.

about Poincaré conjecture brifely described :  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_conjecture

since there is a lots of  mathematican in this nice forum , I think the discovery of Grigori Perelman is very hot subject for discussion ...

personaly i am so eager to know why he is the only one that could solve the problem ? and also what is the application and effect of this success ( maybe future ) ?

A few days ago I asked my wife what she thought was the most important invention of the last 100 years. Without pause, she responded “the credit card!”

I suppose that “important” is relative, but my answer is the transistor. As Wikipedia puts it, “The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and its presence is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems.” Semiconductors are vital to everyday life because they have radically reduced the size, cost and power consumption of all modern electronics.

Life wouldn’t be the same without transistors (or without credit cards, admittedly). Your laptop would weigh hundreds of pounds and be a “mainframe” computer without transistors. Your television would rely on tubes, and you couldn’t mount it on the wall – it would weigh 100 pounds or so without transistors. No mobile phones, either – your telephone would have a rotary dial, and the handset would be connected with a wire. Telephone directories would still be printed books weighing 5 pounds or so.

It was years since I "derived" the result that slopes of perpendicular lines were negative reciprocals of each other. So I thought it would be easy to show that when , where, in Figure 1, is the slope of line (black) and is the slope of line (red). Clearly, lines and are perpendicular when .

In honor of Pi Day, in this blog I would like to show that the MRB constant has some meaning in our day to day lives. The first two messages are lifted from a discussion group.

I’ve written in the past of how the push for more efficient, “greener” designs are driving innovation in important industries like auto, aerospace, and power.  Over the past few years, we’ve met countless engineers around the world who are working hard to transform conventional designs to highly refined optimal designs in tune with modern realities, and some are, of course, throwing out old ideas all together and venturing into exotic power sources and radical platforms that used to be the stuff of science fiction. Last week I had one of the more interesting and enjoyable encounters with such a group of very talented green engineers.

It would be good if we could flag for admin scrutiny not just posts but also user handles.

It might help with this kind of nonsense.

Amdahl's Law is a formula for determining the theoretical speed up when parallelizing a function. For example, imagine we wanted to parallelize a function that spends 90% of its time in one algorithm. If there is a parallel version of that algorithm, how much faster would the entire function run with 2, 4 or more cores?

In our previous article we described a packed representation for sparse polynomials is designed for scalability and high performance. The expand and divide commands in Maple 14 use this representation internally to multiply and divide polynomials with integer coefficients, converting to and from Maple's generic data structure described here. In this post I want to show you how these algorithms work and why they are fast. It's a critical stepping stone for our next topic, which is parallelization.

Back in September, I posted an announcement about our plans for the new version of MaplePrimes.  Well a few months and many, many hours of development later, we are approaching the end point!