Attention Maple enthusiasts! It gives me great pleasure to announce Maple 2024! Maple 2024 brings together a collection of new features and enhancements carefully designed to enrich your mathematical explorations. Maple 2024 is the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of people, and there is far more in it than I can cover here. But I’d like to share with you some of my favorite features in this release.

AI Formula Assistant

The AI Formula Assistant in Maple 2024 is undoubtedly the feature that excites me the most, especially considering how often I’m asked the question: 'When will Maple include AI features?' This assistant serves as your new mathematical companion and will change the way you look up and enter formulas and equations. Driven by advanced AI technology, it presents a range of relevant options based on your search query. Alongside suggestions, you'll also receive detailed explanations for each formula and its parameters so you can select the one you need, and then you can insert the formula into your document at a click of a button, as a proper Maple expression.

NaturalLanguage Package

The Formula Assistant is built on top of the new NaturalLanguage package, which integrates powerful language models like GPT-4 and ChatGPT from OpenAI into Maple. With this feature, you can leverage large language models to process natural language within Maple. Ask the AI to explain concepts, provide additional details, find specific Maple commands, and more. Of course, since this is a Maple package, you can also use it as a basis to build your own AI-powered applications inside Maple. We’re really looking forward to seeing what you will do with it!

Argument Completion
We’ve had a lot of requests from people who wanted Maple’s command completion features to do even more, and I’m happy to say that Maple 2024 delivers. The new argument completion feature in Maple 2024 is poised to significantly enhance your experience with commands. For many users, including myself, not being aware of all the options a command takes is a challenge, often leading me to refer to help pages for clarification. With argument completion, that's no longer a concern. Just enter the command with the help of the existing command completion feature, then automatic argument completion takes over to guide you through the rest. Give it a try with the 'plot' command!

Check My Work

A personal favorite feature that's gotten even better in Maple 2024 is Check My Work. As someone who has tutored students, I vividly recall their stress before exams, often receiving emails and text messages from them seeking last-minute help. At the time, I found myself wishing the students had a way to check their work themselves, so we would all be less stressed! So I was super excited when we added the first Check My Work feature a couple of years ago, and am very happy that it gets better ever year. In Maple 2024, we’ve expanded its capabilities to support problems involving factoring, simplification, and limits.

Scrollable Matrices:
This feature will definitely resonate with many of the engineers in the Maple Primes community. If you're someone who works with worksheets containing large matrices, you've likely wished that you could scroll the matrices inside your document instead of having to launch a separate matrix browser. With Maple 2024, your wish has come true.

Color Bars

And finally, for those of you who appreciated the addition of color bars in Maple 2023 but wanted to see them extended to more 2D and 3D plots, you'll be delighted to know that this is exactly what we’ve done. We’ve also added new customization options, providing you with greater control over appearance.

This is just a partial glimpse of what's new in Maple 2024. For a comprehensive overview, visit What’s New in Maple 2024.

Time is running out for users of Mathcad^® 15 worksheets.
Engineers who need to retain their historical Mathcad project files are faced with a looming deadline to move the content to another file format.

The good news is that Mathcad 15 users can turn to Maple Flow as an effective replacement design calculation tool. Maple Flow is an advanced calculation tool with a free-form layout that makes it easy for engineers to brainstorm, develop, and document their project designs.

Maplesoft now has an efficient migration solution for moving critical Mathcad content to Maple Flow worksheets. This gives engineers a path to safeguard their critical reference designs, mathematical analyses, and engineering test results.

Why are engineers moving from Mathcad 15?
In 2025, some changes are expected that will severely restrict access to Mathcad 15 software. Here’s some background:

• PTC announced that Mathcad 15 is end-of-sale effective December 2021, restricting license activations for new users.
• Those existing Mathcad 15 customers who bought multiyear license extensions will see them expire by December 2025. After that, those with subscription licenses will not be able to open the app, and will not be able to access their historic design documents.
• One of the significant issues engineers are encountering is that the new version of the software is not directly compatible with their historical Mathcad documents. PTC no longer has the right to distribute software versions with a third-party component, and has opted to use a different symbolic calculation engine in Mathcad Prime® that cannot read and edit the legacy files.
• Another issue is that the Mathcad 15 software does not support Windows 11, so is typically run on Windows 10, a platform that Microsoft will not be supporting after October 2025.
• Without a reliable way to keep accessing their project work in the Mathcad 15 format, engineers are looking for an alternative design worksheet platform.

As a result, engineers with large repositories of these design files now face converting all the worksheets to a new format or risk losing access to valuable design reports, and the possible regulatory consequences.

Maple Flow as a replacement for Mathcad 15
Engineers who want a long-term stable environment for their critical project work can change their design workflow to use Maple Flow for everyday calculation tasks.

The advanced math features and formatting options in Maple Flow make it a good fit for creating (and updating) design documentation and hand calculations, where engineers combine mathematical equations and variables that change regularly, and show the results in a report.

Maple Flow has a short learning curve, and the range of example templates in the Application Center and the customized training all help users quickly get up to speed with Maple Flow commands and formatting features.

How can I migrate Mathcad 15 content to Maple Flow?
Maplesoft has created a series of migration strategies for users of Mathcad software to transition to Maple Flow for ongoing calculation needs or to meet compliance requirements.

For engineers with a handful of worksheets, or where the calculations only span a few pages, it is relatively quick to reenter the calculations directly in Maple Flow. Some steps will need to be updated to the equivalent Maple Flow function, and there is also the opportunity to use features that are not available in Mathcad 15 (or its successor Mathcad Prime), such as advanced signal processing tools, thermodynamic data, and functionality for the analysis of linear systems.

For engineering firms with large repositories of legacy Mathcad 15 files, Maplesoft has developed a convenient path to migrate batches of content into Maple Flow. Maplesoft Engineering Services guide customers through the migration process and apply an efficient Migration Assistant to move the equations, variable definitions, units, layout, and other supported features from Mathcad 15 worksheets to Maple Flow. The content is mapped to the equivalent Maple Flow functionality, so that calculations can be run and developed further. This allows project worksheets and templates to be recreated with the least investment in time.

This image shows a calculation section before and after batch migration into Maple Flow format:

Ongoing support from Maplesoft

Maple Flow was first launched in 2021 and was developed to give engineers a single tool that can perform mathematical analysis and present results in a professional-looking format. There is built-in support for natural mathematical notation and tracking units, and the development roadmap continues to follow a user-focused approach, so new usability enhancements are regular and relevant.

The current release of Maple Flow gives engineers a path to avoid losing legacy calculations and designs previously stuck in Mathcad 15 worksheets and reuse the content for ongoing project work.

If you would like assistance from Maplesoft with migrating large repositories of design worksheets, please contact Maplesoft Sales.

[This is a contributed article by Alex Beilby, Technical Marketing Mgr, Maplesoft]

The Lunar New Year is approaching and 2024 is the Year of the Dragon! This inspired me to create a visualization approximating the dragon curve in Maple Learn, using Maple. 

The dragon curve, first described by physicist John Heighway, is a fractal that can be constructed by starting with a single edge and then continually performing the following iteration process:  

Starting at one endpoint of the curve, traverse the curve and build right triangles on alternating sides of each edge on the curve. Then, remove all the original edges to obtain the next iteration. 

This process continues indefinitely, so while we can’t draw the fractal perfectly, we can approximate it using a Lindenmayer system. In fact, Maple can do all the heavy lifting with the tools found in the Fractals package, which includes the LSystem subpackage to build your own Lindenmayer systems. The subpackage also contains different examples of fractals, including the dragon curve. Check out the Maple help pages here: 

Overview of the Fractals Package  

Overview of the Fractals:-LSystem Subpackage 

Using this subpackage, I created a Maple script (link) to generate a Maple Learn document (link) to visualize the earlier iterations of the approximated dragon curve. Here’s what iteration 11 looks like: 

You can also add copies of the dragon curve, displayed at different initial angles, to visualize how they can fit together. Here are four copies of the 13th iteration: 

Mathematics is full of beauty and fractals are no exception. Check out the LSystemExamples subpackage to see many more examples. 

Happy Lunar New Year! 

The Maple Conference starts tomorrow Oct. 26 at 9am EDT! It's not too late to register: https://www.maplesoft.com/mapleconference/2023/. Even if you can't attend all the presentations, registration will allow you to view the recorded videos after the conference. 

Check out the detailed conference program here: https://www.maplesoft.com/mapleconference/2023/full-program.aspx

Happy Pride Month, everyone! June is a month for recognizing and celebrating the LGBT+ community. It was started to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which were a landmark event in the fight for LGBT+ rights. We celebrate Pride Month to honour those who have fought for their rights, acknowledge the struggles the LGBT+ community continues to face to this day, and celebrate LGBT+ identities and culture.

This Pride Month, I want to give a special shoutout to those in the math community who also identify as LGBT+. As a member of the LGBT+ community myself, I’ve noticed a fair amount of stigma against being queer in math spaces—and surprisingly often coming from within the community itself. It’s one thing for us to make jokes amongst ourselves about how none of us can sit in chairs properly (I don’t even want to describe how I’m sitting as I write this), but the similar jokes I’ve heard my LGBT+ friends making about being bad at math are a lot more harmful than they might realize. And of course it isn’t just coming from within the community—many people have a notion (whether conscious or unconscious) that all LGBT+ people are artistically inclined, not mathematical or scientific. Obviously, that’s just not true! So I want to spend some time celebrating queerness in mathematics, and I invite you to do the same.

One of the ways we’re celebrating queerness in math here at Maplesoft is with new Pride-themed Maple Learn documents, created by Miles Simmons. What better way to celebrate Pride than with trigonometry? This document uses sinusoidal transformations to mimic a pride flag waving in the wind. You can adjust the phase shift, vertical shift, horizontal stretch, and vertical stretch to see how that affects the shape of the flag. Then, you can watch the animation bring the flag to life! It’s a great way to learn about and visualize the different ways sinusoidal waves can be transformed, all while letting your colours fly!

For more trigonometry, you can also check out this fun paint-by-numbers that can help you practice the sines, cosines, and tangents of special angles. And, as you complete the exercise, you can watch the Pride-themed image come to life! Nothing like adding a little colour to your math practice to make it more engaging.

If you’re looking for more you can do to support LGBT+ mathematicians this Pride Month, take a look at Spectra, an association for LGBT+ mathematicians. Their website includes an “Outlist” of openly LGBT+ mathematicians around the world, and contact information if you want to learn more about their experiences. The Fields Institute has also hosted LGBT+Math Days in the past, which showcases the research of LGBT+ mathematicians and their experiences of being queer in the math community. Blog posts like this one by Anthony Bonato, a math professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, and interviews like this one with Autumn Kent, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, can also help allies in mathematics to understand the experiences of their queer colleagues and how to best support them. Math is everywhere and for everyone—so let’s make sure that the systems we use to teach and explore math are for everyone too!

Happy Pride! 🏳️‍🌈

The first day of Maple Conference 2022 is coming up on November 2 and it's not too late to register! Please go to our conference home page and click on the "Register Now" button. This is a free virtual event open to all.

The schedule is available on the conference agenda page.

Come join us to see recent developments in research, education and applications, find out about new and upcoming features in our products, talk to Maplesoft staff and other members of the Maple community and view (and vote on) Maple and Maple Learn artwork.

We hope to see you at the conference!

Who else likes art?  I love art; doodling in my notebook between projects and classes is a great way to pass the time and keep my creativity sharp.  However, when I’m working in Maple Learn, I don’t need to get out my book; I can use the plot window as my canvas and get my drawing fix right then and there.

We’ve done a few blog posts on Maple Learn art, and we’re back at it again in even bigger and better ways.  Maple Learn’s recent update added some useful features that can be incorporated into art, including the ability to resize the plot window and animate using automatically-changing variables.

Even with all the previous posts, you may be thinking, “What’s all this?  How am I supposed to make art in a piece of math software?”  Well, there is a lot of beauty to mathematics.  Consider beautiful patterns and fractals, equations that produce surprisingly aesthetically interesting outputs, and the general use of mathematics to create technical art.  In Maple Learn, you don’t have to get that advanced (heck, unless you want to).  Art can be created by combining basic shapes and functions into any image you can imagine.  All of the images below were created in Maple Learn!

There are many ways you can harness artistic power in Maple Learn.  Here are the resources I recommend to get you started.

1. I’ve recently made some YouTube videos (see the first one below) that provide a tutorial for Maple Learn art.  This series is less than 30 minutes in total, and covers - in three respective parts - the basics, some more advanced Learn techniques, and a full walkthrough of how I make my own art.
2. Check out the Maple Learn document gallery art collection for some inspiration, the how-to documents for additional help, and the rest of the gallery to see even more Maple Learn in action!

Once you’re having fun and making art, consider submitting your art to the Maple Conference 2022 Maple Learn Art Showcase.  The due date for submission is October 14, 2022.  The Conference itself is on November 2-3, and is a free virtual event filled with presentations, discussions, and more.  Check it out!

This is a friendly reminder that the deadline for submissions for this year's Maple Conference Creative Works Exhibit is fast approaching!

If you are looking for inspiration, you can take a look at the writeup of the works that were featured last year in this write up in the most recent issue of Maple Transations.

Also, don't forget that you can also submit art made in Maple Learn for a special exhibit alongside the main gallery.

As we head back to school, I want to take a moment to thank all the math teachers out there who take on the demanding yet overlooked task of educating our children, teenagers, and young people. 

I'm where I am today because my calculus teacher, Prof. Srinivasan, was unwavering in her belief that my classmates and I could master any math topic, including calculus. Her conviction in me gave me the confidence to believe I could 'do' math. While Prof. Srinivasan made teaching look easy, I'm acutely aware that teaching math is no easy feat. Speaking with math educators regularly, I can appreciate how challenging teaching math is today compared to a decade ago. Not only do they have to teach the subject, but they must be able to teach it in-person and online, to a group of students that may not be up to speed on the prerequisite material, and in an era where disruptive technologies vie for their student's attention. No wonder math educators are so anxious about returning to the classroom this fall!

And while I wish I could abracadabra your worries away, what I can do is offer you the opportunity to use Maple Learn, a tool built to support the utopian vision of a world where all students love math. A world where math is for everyone, not just the gifted, and the purpose of math class is to explore and marvel at the wonders of the universe, not just get to the correct answer.

Slightly more concretely, Maple Learn is a flexible interactive environment for exploring concepts, solving problems, and creating rich online math content. I've seen educators use Maple Learn to help their students: 

• Grasp a definition or particularly tricky proof (for example, Formal Definition of the  Partial Derivative)
• Explore a concept and question their initial assumptions and beliefs (such as Is it an Odd or Even Function)
• Master a particular solving technique through drill and practice worksheets (Calculating Volumes)
• Work collaboratively on a math project (Designing a Roller Coaster)

I’ve talked to lots of instructors, in math, and in courses like economics and physics that use math, who have lots of ideas of how to engage their students and deepen their understanding through interactive online activities. What they don’t have are the tools, programming experience, deployment platform, or time to implement their vision. Fortunately, Maple Learn makes it incredibly easy to develop and share your own content, and all you need are your ideas and a web browser. But you don’t need to start from scratch. You can choose from an extensive, constantly growing repository of ready-made, easily customizable content covering a wide range of topics. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is, but since we are well aware that instructors are extremely busy people, we also have content development services that can help you transform your static content into interactive lessons.

If you haven't looked at Maple Learn, or it's been a while since you last saw it, you can visit Reinventing Math Education with Maple Learn for more information, including an upcoming webinar you might be interested in attending and a special offer on Maple Learn for Maple campuses. And if you ever want to discuss ways Maple Learn might help you, or have ideas on how to make it better, please reach out. I'm always up for good conversation. 

And for all the dedicated teachers who are taking a deep breath and heading back into the classroom this fall, thank you.

We are happy to announce that we released MapleSim 2022 today.

The MapleSim 2022 family of products offers improvements in modeling and connectivity, including many that are in direct response to customer requests. Improvements include:

• Reduce diagram clutter by using “wireless” To-From blocks for a larger variety of signals
• Easily create, customize, and fine-tune control valves with new components and tools in the hydraulics library
• Expand modeling scope with improvements to several specialized libraries and toolboxes, including the MapleSim add-on products for Battery, Heat Transfer, and Web Handling
• New productivity and connectivity features in MapleSim Insight,  a standalone product in the MapleSim family that gives machine builders powerful simulation-based debugging and 3-D visualization capabilities that connect directly to your automation tools

See What’s New in MapleSim 2022 for more information about these and other improvements.

Today is one of my favorite days of the year. After months and months of hard work by a lot of people, it’s finally arrived:

It's Maple launch day!

Yes, I am very pleased to announce that Maple 2022 is here.

As we’ve done in years past, Samir and I started this release by spending many hours reviewing feedback from Maple Primes posts, support emails, sessions with staff who regularly talk with customers and who use Maple themselves, and our own direct conversations with customers. Of course a year is never enough to implement every good idea, but our goal was to identity a feature set that would appeal to, delight, and hopefully excite our customers.

Ultimately, you will be the judge, but I can tell that there are some things in Maple 2022 that I am personally very excited about. These are “quality of life” improvements that have been requested by customs and make some things in Maple that were frankly kind of annoying a lot better. The rest of this post will discuss my favorite improvements in more detail (or you can watch this video), and of course, you can get much more information about these and all the other improvements in What’s New in Maple 2022.

#1 – Did you ever find yourself jumping back and forth between your Maple document and Print Preview, again and again, as you prepare your worksheet for printing or export to PDF? It can be a pain, especially with long documents that include plots, tables, and sections. So I'm happy to announce that Maple 2022 includes a new Print Layout mode. This new layout mode lets you see the page boundaries as you edit the document, so you can adjust your content as you go. In Maple 2022, what you see on the page is what you get when you print or export to PDF. Hurray!

#2 – Are you tired of explaining to your students why the graph of tan(x) doesn’t look right in Maple?  Good news!  With Maple 2022, you won’t have to have that conversation ever again. Maple 2022's new adaptive plotting algorithm means that when you plot tan(x), 1/(1-x), floor and ceiling functions, and most other curves with discontinuities, you’ll get what you expect by default – no more vertical lines, no need to specify the discont option, and it’s still fast.

#3 – Did you ever run into a situation where zooming, panning, or resizing your plot didn’t actually give you the better view of the plot you were looking for? Now Maple recomputes and redraws when needed to give you what you wanted – a good look at your plot.

#4 – Are you a fan of the Plot Builder? If you are, I'm delighted to let you know that the Plot Builder in Maple 2022 now supports plotting multiple expressions together on the same axes. So don't hold back - use the Plot Builder to customize plots and animations of any number of 2-D and 3-D expressions plots and animations. (We also got rid of that annoying empty plot when you first open it, too.)

#5 - And, by popular demand, Maple 2022 now magnifies the text in the table of contents/search results when you magnify a help page. No more squinting to find the topic of interest. My eyes are much happier.

Those are my favorites, but there is a lot more in the release. To learn more about all the improvements in Maple 2022, visit What’s New in Maple 2022

We have just issued a critical fix to Maple, MapleSim, and Maple Flow running on macOS.

We have heard from some users who were experiencing serious problems with doubled characters while using Maplesoft products on macOS, including these reports on MaplePrimes. Further investigation determined that these problems appear specifically on macOS 11 and macOS 12.  I am happy to report that we have now corrected the problem, and a patch is available. 

Anyone who uses macOS 11 or macOS 12 should install this update immediately. We also strongly recommend that all macOS users install this update, to avoid problems that may be triggered by future updates to your operating system.

To obtain this update:

• If you have Maple only, follow the instructions on the Maple 2021.2.1 update page.
• If you have MapleSim, visit the MapleSim 2021.2.1 update page.
• If you have Maple Flow, follow the instructions for Maple Flow 2021.2.1.

For those who have experienced problems, we apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience while we worked to find a solution.

As most Maple Primes readers have hopefully seen, Maplesoft is having our Maple Conference again this fall. This year we decided to add a space to the conference to showcase creative and artistic work that would be interesting to our Maple Community. The conference organizers asked me if I would coordinate and curate this exhibition of creative uses of Math and Maple, and I agreed. So now, I am asking the Maple community to send us your most creative work related to or using Maple.

The obvious thing to submit would be a beautiful digital plot or animation with an interesting mathematical story and of course, we are really interested to see those. But, we would are especially excited to see some art created with physcial media. I would love to see your knitting or needle point project that is inspired by a mathematical theme or was created with the help of Maple.

The full announcement can be found at the Maple Conference Art Gallery page. We would like to have all submissions by October 12th so that can review and finalize the gallery before the conference begins November 1st.

Oh yeah, there will also be prizes.

I can't wait to see what everyone sends in!

We have just released an update to Maple, Maple 2021.1.

Maple 2021.1 includes improvements to plotting, export to PDF and LaTeX, the user interface, the mathematics engine, and more. We strongly recommend that all Maple 2021 users install these updates.

This update is available through Tools>Check for Updates in Maple, and is also available from our website on the Maple 2021.1 download page, where you can also find more details.

In particular, please note that this update includes fixes to the sometimes missing plotting toolbar, the misplaced plot annotations on export, and a workbook saving problem, all reported on MaplePrimes.

Thanks for the feedback!

We’re excited to announce the release of MapleSim 2021! The MapleSim 2021 family of products lets you build and explore models more easily than ever, with improved simulation performance and 3-D visualizations, new ways to share models with those who don’t use MapleSim, and a host of new and expanded component libraries. Improvements include:

• Improved performance for large models that allows you to take advantage of the fastest simulations yet – no matter how complex your design is.
• More realistic 3-D visualizations with the ability to define dynamic shape sizes, such as spheres and cylinders that expand or contract over the course of the simulation, so components are realistically represented throughout.
• Expanded modeling scope for machine builders, with a new pneumatics component library and expanded hydraulics support, as well as improved visualizations in the MapleSim Ropes and Pulleys Library add-on.
• New simulation and analysis features in MapleSim Insight, a standalone product in the MapleSim family that provides anyone in your organization with access to powerful simulation-based debugging and 3-D visualization capabilities that connect directly to common automation platforms.

See What’s New in MapleSim 2021 for more information about these and other improvements!