XKCD continues to post some great comics, often relating to math. Check this one out:

And yes, Maple does get it right

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The appearance of this thread has degraded over the years, but most all post about the MRB constant can be found by entering "MRB constant" into the search box.

Some links were updated on June 26, 2010.

I found some comments in my blog written in inappropriate tone and style and asked the site administrator to move them from my blog to this person's blog who posted them. However, my repeated requests were rejected. A blog is not a forum where everybody's posts are appropriate. A blog is a personal place on the web, something like a part of your home. And you can choose whom to invite to your home and who is not desirable - that is a standard policy regarding blogs, I think. Also, if somebody wouldn't like to see my comments in his/her blog, I would be happy to put them in my blog and not in that person's blog who objects to them.

A few years ago I saw somewhere in a math forum a brain-teaser type problem which I'm about to present. I wasn't able to solve it at the time. I haven't been able to find the original forum, so I don't know whether or not my answer is right. I do know that I could never have attacked the problem without MAPLE. We have a cube of edge a and a drill bit of diameter b. We drill one hole from the center of the front face to the center of the back face, and another from the center of the right face to the center of the left. What is the total volume of material removed? I get (Pi*(b^2)*a)/2 - ((2/3)*b^3) Am I right?

This page contains a great collection of different Maplets. Many users will be intersted in the Sudoku maplet. There are also some other interesting tools and games there. http://maplenet.msc.uky.edu/maplets/

これは私の最初のブログです。mapleprimesで日本語のブログは規則違反でしょうか・・・

I am looking for a job. Here is my vita.

After installing the critical security updates for Windows 2003 (August Bulletin) I've found that Maple 10 will no longer start. The splash screen appears though there is no progress bar. The splash screen (mws32.exe?) eventually dissapears silently leaving behind an orphaned maplew.exe.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with these updates?

Note: Classic Maple 10 starts with no problems.

Perseverance pays. As someone else commented, Maple has been around for a while and their are different packages that are kept for backward compatability but may be incompatible with more modern versions. Likewise the basic tools that take advantage of the new packages aren't always in place yet. Now that I have a better handle on this aspect of Maple's structure I am having many fewer issues. I now know how to recognize the symptoms of such collisions. More specifically, while I was originally frustrated with VectorCalculus I am now quite a fan once I got a hold of how it works. I just needed to translate how I do things on a blackboard (or on paper) to how Maple wants to see it. Beyond that, I also have to be able to explain what I am doing to others. For anyone moving along the same path I suggest going back to basics. I pulled an old vector calc. book off the shelf and re-examined how to think about the basic definitions (I teach physics, not math, so I tend to take a lazy "let's just get it done" approach to complex math problems). I then saw immediately what the programmers were trying to do and how they were doing it. I also found it helpful to build some visualization tools which will help this coming year as I build some presentations. By going through the process myself and reviewing how I would go about generalizing some of the problems encountered in vector calc I was able to understand the approach Maple was taking.

This is the kind of thing that can drive a beginner crazy. The behavior of the engine changes as a result of including different libraries. The engine isn't extended, it is changed. This makes for a very tough learning curve.

I have been playing with Maple on and off for 3 months. This summer, now that school is out, I have set about trying to master this environment. My frustration with Maple has subsided a bit only to be replaced with an understanding of its limitations. I set about building my own package of doing surface and flux integrals as a way of discovering how to manipulate expressions. I think I know why Maple is so tough. I read somewhere on these forums a diatribe on what seemed an esoteric nuance in the difference between the way Mathematica approaches functions vs the way Maple does. Mathematica is essentially a functional programming language wrapped around list structures (ala LISP). In mathematica everything, at the ground level, is a list. Various types get defined for different quantities but they are essentially lists. Maple defines its types internally. I don't know how they are put together (rtables?) Maple has evolved over time so that these types have grown to a huge number that are hard to keep track of. The inability of maple functions to screen their inputs for different data types means that the Maple programmers have to write lots of different functions for the different data types. This is a very old style of programming.

Yesterday I downloaded and installed the latest upgrade to Maple 10.05 for OS X. Today I find that I can open two worksheet sessions, but not a third. Opening a third file takes ages (approx. 30 sec) and when I try to execute the file, I get the message "Waiting for kernel connection." This behavior is consistent over several tries. I have a Power PC with 1 GB SD RAM. Has anyone else seen this behavior?

To mark the end of eleven very fruitful years in residence at the University of Waterloo, I have written a goodbye essay. The title and abstract appear below, along with a link to the full text. The essay describes my long-term research goals and presents my personal vision for the future of the areas of mathematics in which I work.

With mapleSTUDIO you can plot functions in 2D and 3D. Animating your plots won't be a problem any time. This is the easiest way to plot your functions.
You can use it here online on mapleNET or you can download it and run the worksheet on your Computer. For adding new components to this worksheet I will only change the file on mapleprimes, but the name and the URL will be the same. So you should bookmark the mapleNET-URL for using the newest version of mapleSTUDIO. You can also add my Blog to your Feed-Reader, so you will know, when a new version is available.

Ten days playing with Maple has proven that skills in one system don't necessarily translate to another. I have encountered a number of frustrations which are not so much a problem with Maple as my inability to match the subtleties of the new system. Some of the issues I have encountered:

• periodic locking up of the interface in document mode (this may be due to something I am doing wrong)
• getting used to the maple syntax and command list (it is further than the syntax of Mathematica than I originally suspected yet similar enough to completely mess me up)
• occasional odd state like behavior (which is, again, probably due to my ignorance than a problem with Maple)