In his last blog post “Watching the Dawn”, Fred Kern comments on the life of an engineer before the realization that symbolic approaches to computing can get you better results faster. The analogy is, of course, prior to this revelation we were in some sense in the dark. I’d like to add my two cents worth as I was indeed one of those engineers lurking in the dark for many years.

Flash back about 20 or so years.  I was a poor graduate student and to feed myself, I began doing small jobs for this new company called Waterloo Maple Software (which eventually became Maplesoft).  Mostly, my work was to develop small applications or demonstrations with an engineering focus.  I remember with great fondness, the look of shock and awe that would come over my engineering colleagues’ faces when I showed them how I computed symbolic matrix products or performed a cumbersome simplification in seconds. For me, it was an obvious thing to do because I had access to the technology and I didn’t know any better. But for them, it seemed like pure voodoo. But in reality, the common themes that I somehow fumbled upon during these early presentations would later reappear in much richer, exciting forms as core themes in the eventual “symbolic sunrise” twenty years later.

I’ve flown across the oceans hundreds of times, but anyone who has done it even once has experienced the beautiful view of a dawn or a sunset.  That is, if you weren’t asleep.

I’ve had the good fortune to witness other dawns and sunsets – the dawn of new technologies, and the sunset of others.  I’m old enough to remember the dawn of ATMs, fax machines, the internet, wireless technology, transistors, personal computers and several other things that are basic to our lives today.  I actually contributed in a small way to at least two of those “dawns”.

The truth is that most technology dawns are more obvious in the “afternoon” – a few years after the dawn.  When it’s happening, it often seems like a complicated and possibly interesting thing, but the full potential impact isn’t always clear (at least to me).

I’m quite sure that I’m witnessing another new dawn today.  It’s the dawn of symbolic computing technology revolutionizing the world of engineering.

There was some recent discussion about Maple's Standard GUI having two parsers. (See here, and its parent.)

I've been accumulating a list of some differences between the parsers of 2D Math and 1D Maple notation, for the same given pasted input.

In particular, I'm interested here in differences...

MaplePrimes is a community where thousands of members share their expertise and knowledge of Maplesoft products, and of math & technical topics in general.  To help nurture the environment, and to maintain a quality resource for MaplePrimes members, we have decided to extend content moderation to the community.

I expect that the roles of moderators will evolve as we move forward, but to start, moderator’s will have the following capabilities:

• Remove commercial messages (spam) or otherwise inappropriate or offensive content as described  in the MaplePrimes Community Guidelines.
• Re-categorize posts to the correct forum category.
• Select high quality blog posts or message topics to appear on the front page of MaplePrimes.
• Correct bad formatting within messages.

It appears that once a new version of maple has been released, all refining and polishing up of the previous version stops. 

Are any of the older Maple versions still useful? 

I'm sure they still have their usefulness on older systems that don't have much memory and can't handle the newer versions system requirements.   Besides that, and the renaming of some routines and packages would one ever have the need to go back to an older version?  Let's say for example I have Maple 12, 9.5 and 7 on my machine and I wanted to start a worksheet, would I ever have the need to start one on Maple 7? 

I came across a reference to a Maple package named centermanifold. The reference is: Computation of Center Manifolds, Nov 11, 2000, Robert Corless, Keith Geddes and Xianping Liu.

But I couldn't get my hands on the package, I tried google and email but so far no success, does anyone at mapleprimes know if this package is available somewhere?

Or some very close substitute? thanks!

We have re-enabled new user registration. We will be keeping a close eye on new content and users on the site over the next couple of days. We hope that by closing down registration temproarily, we may have stopped the spammers from coming to the site, but we will be making several immediate changes to reduce the amount of spam on the site including adding a Captcha to the user registration form.

We apologize again for the inconvenience caused by the spam attack. It was unfortunate timing having this happen over the holidays.

Hello,

I'm having troubles to log in into my account lately - Maple Primes doesn't seem to recognize either my username or my password. When I request a new password and then change it in my profile, the same problem comes back the next time I want to sign in. I'm using my e-mail adress as my username - could the problem be this? I was able to sign in quite easily until recently thoug.

Thanks

Magdalena

Excuse me, I'm very new here, but what's the main purpose behind users blogs on mapleprimes ? I see many (perhaps most ?) blog postings that could just as easily (and perhaps more usefully, for other members, that is) be posted in forums since they are often asking for advice on various matters.....

As many of you have noticed, MaplePrimes has been deluged with a spam attack over the past week.  We have been working to keep it under control, but the attacks are coming faster than we can reasonably keep up.

Although it's obvious and usual that newer or, the latest versions, consume more resources and CPU power, it is noticeable on a mediocre older system that Maple 13 is slower than Maple 12.  This point is merely for interest sake only and maybe for Maplesoft to take a look into their code to see if they can improve it's performance. 

If you highlight words that are above or below one another on an adjacent line, the highlighting does not highlight properly.