I have two suggestions how the developers of Maple could improve the software

1) Improved  capabilities for algebra.

Currently it is difficult to do mathematical manipulation (sometime even simple stuff) with Maple.

In a perfect world I could just right click on an expression and then get all the possible permutations of that expression.

I usually dont use Maple when it comes to manipulating algebraic expressions because I usually end up getting angry.

2) Loop protection

An annoying feature of Maple is that if it crashes (all too often) & you have not given your worksheet a name, the file is lost despite having activated Auto-Save.

1)   Is the previous statement correct for Maple 9.5?

2)   If so, has this bug been corrected in later versions?

Alla

Is it possible to perform an external call to a Java method that is not static?

When I attempt to  use the Maple function define_external with a java method that does not include the keyword 'static', Maple does not locate the method and returns an error.

Though it does not appear in the help documentation, it appears that external calls to Java methods is restricted to static methods.

Is this true?

I am using Maple 10.04.

Thanks

Bill

If you have a single variable polynomial you must specify the variable in the sort command when using the ascending and descending option.  Ascending or descending will not work without it.  It's obvious you need to express it with more than one variable but for single variables it should not be needed.

As a simple example.   b:=x+x^3+x^2;

Sort(b)  gives x^3+x^2+x and sort(b,ascending) gives the same answer as does Sort(b,descending)

A colleague of mine recently mentioned something to me about an article that circulates every year during the holiday season, entitled “The Physics of Santa Claus”. This was news to me, so I ran a few Google searches to find out what she was talking about.

It seemed that some enterprising person had taken the time to go through and explain just what is involved in Santa’s Christmas Eve trip around the world delivering presents. How many households does he have to visit? How much do all those presents really weigh? How fast do the reindeer need to fly in order to get it all done in a finite amount of time? There is much speculation as to the origins of this piece; the general consensus seems to be that it began life published in SPY magazine in the early 1990s. Whatever the true story, it’s still an entertaining read in 2008.

I’ve taken some time to update the original with more current data – for instance, it seems the world’s population has grown a bit in the last 20 years. According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world population in 2008 was approximately 6,705 billion; 28% of these are children (defined as being under 15):

In fact, making some assumptions about the percentage of these children that celebrate Christmas and the number of children per household, it turns out that Santa needs to visit close to 200 million homes in one night.

We assume he distributes gifts from 5 pm to midnight, or for 7 hours. Due to the Earth's rotation, there is an overall time difference of 24 hours between different time zones, so we can therefore say that Santa has 31 hours to finish his work (assuming he logically travels east to west). Visiting 200 million homes in 31 hours means that Santa has to visit approximately 1586 homes per second:

This gives him about 1/1600th of a second to do everything at each home, such as parking his sleigh, looking for the right gifts, climbing down the sleigh and chimney, binge on snacks, fill the stockings, come up again and rush to his next stop!

For the complete details of his annual trip, visit the Applications Center where I’ve posted the Maple document in which I’ve recreated the Santa calculations. Happy Holidays!!

Just a small issue maple could fix in an update. 

When you reach the bottom of the screen and you're typing out a long equation with many brackets the gray bar that is supposed to match them up underneath the equation is out of view.  It's nothing major and I'm sure maple already knows about this, it's probably not high on their priority list to fix but just as an FYI for them to fix for future updates.

The Maplesoft office is currently in the process of being burried in snow and many of us are getting ready to head off for the holidays.  Before leaving, I wanted to share this great animated GIF created using 3d plots.  It was sent to me by Bruce Char at Drexel University. The greeting and the Maple script to generate it are after the break.

My wife will tell you that I am horrible at remembering important things like birthdays and sending Christmas cards on time … or at all. As we approach the end of another remarkable year, it’s always rewarding to reflect on the events of the year and take the time to thank all those who made the year so remarkable. So, in no particular order

And probably on your mind as well.

When there isn’t a hot news story about an election, a scandal or a disaster, it seems that China is the constant background music we all hear.  China’s incredible growth.  China’s incredible wealth.  China’s growing need for oil that will soon exceed world production capacity.  China as the manufacturer of everything.

I’m sure you’ve heard the same.

In my previous post, I was parsing data out of HTML tables so that I could glean some trivia from it.  My true goal was to compile data out of dozens of such tables and so I needed a way to do the whole process in Maple.   So, now, here is how I used Sockets and StringTools to automate the whole process.

Recently there was some discussion in the Maplesoft office about unisex baby names (that is, names that nearly as likely to belong to males as females). Whenever discussing names, I usually head to the US Social Security Administration's wonderful baby names site. They have data on the top 1000 male and female names for children born in the US each year for more than the last century (that includes about 80% of names). They slice the data a little by US state, and popular names for twins and such, but they do not include data on unisex names. So, I applied Maple to the task.

We are happy to announce Maplesoft's latest solution for modeling and simulation is now available!  For those of you who are not familiar with the product, it is a high-performance multi-domain modeling and simulation tool which will revolutionize how you bring products to market.

To learn more about MapleSim follow this link.

Recently, I was reading about random.org again.  It is an online random number generating service that uses atmospheric noise gathered from radios tuned between stations as a source of randomness.  It has been running more or less continuously for about ten years.   On their analysis page there is a nice pair of bitmaps (scroll down past the Dilbert comic) that contrast their random bits with those from one version of the PHP rand() function. Basically this demonstrates how easy it is to create a pseudo-random number generator that is periodic with too small of a period.

I decided to take a look at Maple's random number generator in comparison.

I am a math teacher and was wondering if Maplesoft offers special pricing for Maple. I will purchase Maple with my funds for my class activities so I am not talking about academic pricing.

My computer has Mac OS X 10.5.5   Does latest version of Maple works with this OS?