I've created a Maple help page, saved in a small hdb file, that describes the hierarchy of Maple's numerical types.  Insert it into the path assigned to ?libname.  Access the help page with ?numer-hier. To make it compact, I took some liberties with the notation.  Here is what it looks like

I'm posting it here to keep a record for myself.

my second blog post, aka "the lost blog post", is here.

Still some way to go. The following still needs to be tweaked case by case. And it can be made more compact too. Are the arrows flying so much faster in the top triangular area or are the arrows not printing where I expected them to ...

This post is a quick book review of

The Art of Multiprocessor Programming
by Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit

funny that, how do I go from first blog post to third blog post!?!?!

that's because my second blog post appears as a comment to my first blog post.

you've just got to learn...

Since much of what I post couldn't possibly be of interest to anyone else, I thought I'd use the blog. If I remember its existence, I'll try to post here stuff to myself. After all it's less likely to be lost here than in the maze of my harddrive.

Undergraduate engineering and science consists of learning various rules and laws that govern the domains of interest. For me, it was Maxwell’s Equations for electromagnetics, the Navier-Stokes equation for acoustics, the Rayleigh criterion for imaging, the speed of light, et cetera ad nauseam. What is frequently missed or neglected in teaching and in practice is how these rules and limits are simply the boundaries of the game – endpoints on a spectrum of possibilities. That’s why a recent headline caught my attention: “Computers to Get Faster Only for 75 More Years". I find it hard to believe that humans a thousand years from now will be commemorating 2084 as “The Year Computers Stopped Getting Faster”. After reading the research paper from which this headline arose, I was reminded that innovative science doesn’t set limits, it uses them as tools. Since this is precisely what we do in Applications Engineering at Maplesoft, I thought it would be worth looking into a little further.

If you were to stroll into the Application Engineering office at Maplesoft, you might be led to believe that we subsist on nothing but donuts, pizza, chocolate and coffee.  It’s even worse at this time of year when we have many more opportunities to over-consume. I try to have a balanced diet, but there are too many temptations scattered around the office (including candy at the office entrance – our receptionist, Walli, expects me at 3pm each day without fail). It doesn’t help that a virtually limitless supply of donuts are only a three minute drive away.

Every year my extended family does a "secret santa" gift exchange. Each person draws another person at random and then gets a gift for them. At first, none of my siblings were married, and so the draw was completely random. Then, as people got married, we added the restriction that spouses should not draw each others names. This restriction meant that we moved from using slips of paper on a hat to using a simple computer program to choose names. Then people began to complain when they would get the same person two years in a row, so the program was modified to keep some history and avoid giving anyone a name in their recent history. This year, not everyone was participating, and so after removing names, and limiting the number of exclusions to four per person, I had data something like this:

Corless & Davenport provide a whole bestiarium of rules. This is a small part of the most simple cases, which I sampled more or less for 'all day use' as reference. They are based on the 'unwinding number' (which is a sheet number of according Riemannian surfaces). It turns out, that Maple can 'proof' the identities, if one does not use the definition, but uses the version given in the help pages (= version 2 in the following).

I have run into a problem with assume. I am using Worksheet mode. When I execute the following simple program I get what I expect.

Hi, I purchased maple 12 for mac last year, and when I bought it I get a download link, but now I have install snow leopard erasing everything, and when I try to download maple 12 by the link I get it says "Expended Download Link. This download link has exceeded its maximum number of attempts." How can I download maple 12 again? Thanks!

While working with a 114,996 point Statistics:-ScatterPlot in xmaple I keep running out of memory.  I am receving the following output to the terminal I used to start xmaple although no errors are reported via the GUI.  Once these errors start appearing in the terminal my plot (in its own window) still responds but it becomes unusably slow.

A Frequent Answers section of MaplePrimes, where users can contribute detailed answers to issues that frequently arise, would be useful.  Responders to typical posts could then add a link to the appropriate answer rather than having to recreate it each time.  Note the suggested title; that seems superior to the more usual Frequently Asked Questions because, quite often, the question is not being asked.  For example, a common problem is using ?sum when ?add should be used.  The corresponding entry might explain why this is an issue, give examples where each

  restart; interface(version);
    Classic Worksheet Interface, Maple 12.02, Windows, Dec 10 2008 Build ID 377066

  # intended to be used for Reals
  p:= y -> PIECEWISE([-1, y < 0],[1, 0 <= y]);

                               { -1        y <...

In the blog MRB Constant-D I noticed a peculiar outcome to several sets of equations involving f(n) = sin((a+b*floor(n))*Pi/M), where M is a constant to be explored, b is a number to be found and a is a "starting value" that causes f(n) ~=  -1, 0 or 1.