Dear Development Team,

obviously this is an acient topic, but I can only repeat the wish to be able to specify the size of a plot in a Document by adding a parameter like "size = [640, 480]" to the plot command or to plots[display]. This would allow to specify plot size and easily create plots having the same size withouzt having to manually drag the plot window.

I do not understand why this feature was never implemented, as this was asked very, very often and it should not be soooo difficult....

(Presentation in Spain a month ago focusing on educational and research use)

Santander_talk.pdf   Download Santander_talk.mw

Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab
Physics, Maplesoft

I am happy to formally announce Maple T.A. 9.5! An expansion on Maple T.A. 9, this release is packed full of innovative features and new tools to assist academic institutions with a variety of different teaching and assessment tasks.

Ever have an issue on your campus where students are required to learn a new piece of technology, but you don’t know how to get them prepared for it? With Maple T.A. 9.5, we have included pre-built content to assist students in learning how to use the Maple T.A. environment, and students can take the new Readiness Test to educate themselves on how to use the system. Tasks such as enabling Java, navigating assignments, grading tests, searching for help, and much more are taught in an interactive setting, and give students the right information they need to become comfortable with Maple T.A.

We haven’t forgotten about instructors and teachers either. We have completely revamped our Instructor Examples to provide educators with a sample question of every single question type in Maple T.A. – that’s over 25 different examples! Instructors are given descriptions, feature lists, and examples for each question type. Additionally, we also created a new Sample Assignment that shows instructors what a typical assignment looks like. They can explore this assignment from both instructor and student viewpoints to test out different options and see what the experience will be like.

Essay questions have been foundational in Maple T.A. for several years now, and Maple T.A. 9.5.makes it even easier to provide feedback for students submitting essays. With the Essay Annotation feature, instructors have the ability to mark-up an essay with comments using a simple drag and drop tool. Using this new tool, your students will be able to see your comments and take note of any issues they had in their writing.

Power outages, automatic updates, computer crashes... we’ve all experienced these unpredictable events, and they can be catastrophic for students trying to meet due dates or if assignments are timed. To help with this Maple T.A. has expanded its Proctor Tools feature.  Instructors can now grant individual students with additional time or date extensions if there are ever any issues.

We’re also giving you a sneak peak at some up-and-coming technology: Gradeable Math Apps. As part of The Möbius Project, you can now embed an interactive Maple worksheet in a Maple T.A. question. Students can move sliders, push buttons, click on plot windows and much more directly inside of a Maple T.A. question. Students are then automatically graded on their interaction with the Math App – just like other question types in Maple T.A.

All these features are all for Maplesoft-hosted and self-hosted users, which also includes all the great stuff from Maple T.A. 9:

• Adaptive Testing
• New Question Repository
• Maple T.A. Cloud
• Hint Deductions
• Reworking Assignments
• MathJax Support
• Distributed Load Balancing
• Permanent User Deletion
• Customizable User Interface
• Multiple Instructors for a Class
• And much more!

At Maplesoft, we are extremely excited about Maple T.A. 9.5, and can’t wait for schools all over the world to begin using it!  And as always, we are very interested in hearing from you about your experiences with Maple T.A., as well as any suggestions you have for future releases.

Thirteen Clickable Calculus examples have been added to the Teaching Concepts with Maple section of the Maplesoft web site. The additions include examples in algebra, differential and integral calculus, lines-and-planes in multivariate calculus, and linear algebra. By my count, this means some 97 Clickable Calculus examples are now available.

In the Algebra/Precalculus section, examples of an

Dear Maple Developers,

Maple offers OpenMaple, which is nice and sufficient for driving Maple from extermal applications.

On the other hand Maple offers only very limited support for calling Java methods from maple (static emthods only, no objects).

So it is only possible with programming some extra static Java adapter classes to work with Java objects and their methods. This is a very cimbersome and clumsy workaround only.

Compared to applications...

At any age we, being somewhat children, ask that. Here is the answer to such a question related to Maple. Let us consider the ODE

ode:=(2x^2-x-1)*y''(x)-(4x^3+x-2)*y'(x)+(4x^3+2x^2-2x+2)*y(x)=0;

and its general solution done with Maple

dsolve(ode);

y(x) = _C1*exp(x^2)+_C2*exp(x)*x.

The first thought is that Maple, mimicking the solution done by hand, finds a particular solution of the equation in the form y*(x)=exp(a*x^2+b*x). It fits...

(Presentation in Spain a month ago with a full description of the project and its current status)

Download PhysicsProjectDescri.mw

Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab
Physics, Maplesoft

I was born on the fourth day of december in 1982 and in next 19 days i am the member of

mapleprimes for exactly 4 years ...

i read about the history of maple , so i noticed it is as old as me :) lucky fo me !

then i interested to know whether is there any special event in the maple lifesplan on my birth day ?

Greetings to all.

A recent post at math.stackexchange.com asked for good approximations to pi using the nine nonzero digits, the four arithmetic operations and exponentiation. The problem definition definitely suggests a computational solution, which is actually non-trivial because the search space of all legal mathematical expressions over the nine digits and with the aforementioned operations is so huge that it cannot possibly be searched exhaustively.

We conduct regular reviews of our platform support to ensure that we are focusing on the platforms that are most valued by our customers. Based on our most recent review, we will offer the next release of Maple on the platforms listed below. As additional versions of operating systems on these platforms are announced, we will take those into account as well.

Supported Platforms and Operating Systems
Windows
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2012
Windows 8

Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Ubuntu 13.10 (Planned)

Mac
OS X 10.7
OS X 10.8

Discontinued
Mac OS X 10.6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 update 5
Ubuntu 12.10
Oracle Solaris 10 (the next release of Maple will not be available on Solaris)

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reply to this topic, or contact us directly at: maplepm (at) maplesoft.com

In a webinar on July 10, 2013, I solved the related rate problem:

Helium is pumped into a spherical balloon at the constant rate of 25 cu ft per min.
At what rate is the surface area of the balloon increasing at the moment when its radius is 8 ft?

A question in the Q&A at the end of the Webinar asked if it were possible to have an animation illustrate the expanding sphere and the rate of change in the surface area thereof. 

I'm fairly sure I discovered a bug with the Maple 17 Calculus Integration tutor.

I was working on int((x^2+2*x)*cos(x), x);.

The first step that the tutor wants you to do is to rewrite the integral by factoring out an x from the first term, and changing cos(x) to -sin(x).

The next step is to rewrite it again, this time changing sin to cos, making the intergal  -x(x+2)cos(x)

Next, the tutor distributes the X again, making the integral -(x^2+2*x...

Voting is open for the first individual prize to be awarded as part of the Möbius App Challenge.  The winner will receive a MacBook Air! 

Here are the finalist Apps:

• Wind Turbine Calculations
• The Cosmic Travel Planner

Technology is changing the face of education. An obvious statement, of course. Everybody from students to instructors to parents will agree. Over 40 years ago, the introduction of the pocket calculator allowed us to change the focus from menial calculations to applying our knowledge to solve problems and discover the power of mathematics. 

Since then we have seen leaps from innovation to innovation. The personal computer. Computer Algebra systems. Tablet computing....

An update to Maple 17 is now available. Maple 17.01 includes improvements to the mathematics, interface, and plotting capabilities of Maple, including:

• An expansion of the  video component to provide new start/stop time index controls and audio file support, as well as improved ability to play video files from a URL
• Extended MATLAB® connectivity to include MATLAB® R2013a
• Improvements to printing and resizing code edit regions