This is sure to become a pressing issue. Maybe adding some kind of visual character recognition gadget for new users with fewer than 10 posts?

P.S. the kind of visual test I routinely fail, yes.

I think it's pretty safe to assume the key additions, improvements, and enhancements for Maple 14 are set. So, planning must be taking place for Maple 15 (and beyond).

Please use replies to this blog post for free-form wish list items for Maple 15. Anything you'd like to see, in any part of Maple, go for it.

Using Maple 12 I have the following behaviour, which I find odd:


1. 'evalb' is correct, 'is' turns out to be false (by example):

  eq:=1/2*I*(-z+ln(exp(z)))/Pi = -1/2*I*(z+ln(exp(-z)))/Pi;

  evalb(eq);
                                false
  is(eq);

This blog entry marks two milestones:

• I will report on my visit to Maplesoft as the first MaplePrimes Mentor of the Year
  
• I wll earn my 1000th MaplePrimes "point"

 
Scheduling this visit was a challenge. Each semester I limit the number of classes that I miss for professional travel and I have numerous (and increasing) adminstrative responsibilities as the Undergraduate Director for the Department of Mathematics at The University of South Carolina (particularly during the summer months). These constraints, combined with the various travel schedules of Maplesoft's staff necessitated the deferral of this trip until November 2009. (The additional one month delay in preparing this is due to end-of-semester administrative responsibilities.) I wrote the original draft of this from various airports on my way to the 14th Asian Conference on Technology and Mathematics in Beijing, China and, now that Christmas is history, have some time to finish it.

I have a P4 3 Ghz machine with 2.5 Gb's of RAM.  Basically I just want to find out what is not normal. 

In Maple when I just randomly press keys as fast as I can on my keyboard I can get my CPU usage up to 25%.  Should it really get that high just typing in letters?  What do other people get?

How do I get a description for all the  _Env... , their usage and impacts setting them?

I am lost with the help pages (in classic mode) and do not even find that in the guides
for programming (neither 'Intro' nor 'Advanced')?

How about selling a T-shirt to publicize Maple?  Many other software companies do so.  If you do not want to get in this business, how about designing an "official" graphic that a user could download and hand off to one of the many custom T-shirt companies on the web. Such a high-res graphic/image could even be included with your product.  As an enthusiastic Maple user, I'd like to spread the word!

I realized the other day that I had not mentioned the Threads:-Add, Threads:-Map, Threads:-Mul and Threads:-Seq functions.  These are parallel implementations of the standard Maple functions, add, map, mul and seq.  They expect the sam

A few months ago, I needed to prepare for a customer on-site training session. As part of the request for topics to be covered during the training, my contact there wanted to talk about contact! Contact models are important for multi-body systems because it is about the interactions between objects.  An important example of a contact model is a tire component that interacts with the road. In this case, the training topic requested was a more generic question: “how to create contact models in MapleSim”.  There are, of course, lots of examples available within MapleSim that contain contact models already. Two particular examples came to mind: 1) the bouncing ball; and 2) the catapult. However, this being a training session, simply presenting the example models would not accomplish the purpose of the session. So I broadened my scope and turned my attention to the question: “how does one model contact in general?”

The MapleSim Tire Component Library has just been released. This product is an add-on to MapleSim. It provides industry standard tire force model components such as Fiala, Calspan, and Pacejka’s magic tire formula. In addition, linear tire models and user-defined tire models are available. Once installed, the tire components work like any other MapleSim components, so you can drag them into your diagram and join them to your existing vehicle model, change parameters, plot and analyze dynamic and kinematic quantities, attach CAD images to be used in the animations, etc.

On and off over the last few months I've been meaning to learn about computing a center manifold approximation and normal form of a dynamic system of three differential equations.

My main reading: Stephen Wiggins, Introduction to Applied Nonlinear Dynamical Systems and Chaos, Second Edition, Springer, 2003.

I want to apply the technique to a system I derived from an optimal control problem. As a first step, I decided to reproduce the steps for the following system, for which the solution has been published.

Below is the latest version of the code to draw iso-chrone lines and a salvo of arrows onto the phase diagram of a two-dimensional system of ordinary differential equations.

I have greatly benefited from inputs by Robert Israel (who wrote the first incarnation of the procedure), Joe Riel, and pagan. A big thankyou!

The procedure is sufficiently developed for my current purpose, so I don't plan to modify it much in the near future.

Tested on Maple 13/ Classic. The last plot combines the isochrones and the salvo.

what I learned today is that you cannot write 1e-i, where i is an unassigned variable (at least not like that):