These are the notes of a new Maple user attempting to come up to speed in, what is for me, a new algebraic manipulation tool. I am looking at the tool not so much as an engine for solving problems as much as I am interested in using it as a tool for teaching advanced physics concepts to students in the secondary school arena. Right now I only seek to use it as an aid to building better presentations for the students as well as supplying a dynamic environment for solving problems for students in my class.

After read this funny post by Will, I implemented a short function in Matlab (linked to Maple) to count the number of occurences of any number into the 10.000 first digits of Pi. Here is the result for the first 9.999 numbers:

http://beta.mapleprimes.com/book/is-your-birthday-contained-in-the-digits-of-pi Yes in the format yymmdd! "I found 720212 starting at this location in PI: 486607"

Well, I'm now the proud owner of the student version of Maple 10. The graphing calculator is neat, and I'm having a blast learning the Maple interface.

Hi everyone! I want to thank Tom Lee for inviting me to join the MaplePrimes community. I feel very enthusiastic about the creative potential of this wonderful collaborative resource and want to take a moment to introduce myself. My first blog post includes a brief biography and states some of my Maple plans and research goals.

I have met several problems trying to install and execute Maple on Fedora Core 4. I begin with Maple 10. Default GUI installation does not work: ============== [root@localhost cdrecorder]# ./installMapleLinuxSU Preparing to install... Extracting the JRE from the installer archive... Unpacking the JRE... Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive... Configuring the installer for this system's environment... awk: cmd. line:6: warning: escape sequence `\.' treated as plain `.' Launching installer... Invocation of this Java Application has caused an InvocationTargetException. This application will now exit. (LAX)

I'm just curious - and I don't work for Maplesoft :) - but what do people here actually use Maple for ? What sorts of problems are you tackling, and what commands/packages do you typically use ? I'm also interested to hear about how people use Maple in teaching (for those that do). Myself I use Maple for research in computer algebra - mostly topics related to polynomial systems. For example, I may be trying to find algorithms to compute in new domains. I like Maple because it is very easy to program mathematical algorithms. It is not quite so easy to get them to run fast, but that gives me something to work on :) I mostly use my own software (PolynomialIdeals + recent code), but I also use the Groebner package and now the RegularChains package (new in Maple 10). I make a point of trying all the other packages every once in a while, since you never know when something is going to be useful. I use the plot commands a lot as well.

Hello All: I am working on generating some correlated sequences using Matrix Exponential techniques. there seems to be some problem with the way maple manages memory (or am i doing something wrong?). specifically, in the code below, i am calling a few functions inside a for loop but none recursively. so as the for loop progresses my stack (memory; seen as PF Usage in win XP) size should not really blow up. right? but in Maple 9.0 and 10.0 this below program would give a "Execution stopped: stack limit reached." exception after about 30000 executions(I am running on a WinXP machine , about 2.8GHz, with 512 MB RAM, also checked on a machine with 1 GB Ram; and another 1GB in page file size). But the same program seems to work alright on the same machines with Maple8 running (i uninstalled maple-9 and installed maple-8 in one case). I could go up to 300,000 iterations without any problem. And the memory would go from about 250MB (PF Usage) to about 800MB. So even in Maple 8 there is some stuff that is being dumped on the stack; i tried to run Garbage collector (gc()) function once every 500 iterations; it did not make any difference either. Can anyone please look into it?

The University of Toronto is Canada's largest university and considered one of its very best. Its downtown campus (St. George) campus is the original site with all of the older buildings (circ. mid 19th century) and most of its most prestigeous faculties. Of note for the math crowd would be the Fields Institute .

I was doing some stuff with the quadratic nonlinearities that interest me. The quadratic nonlinearities involve structure having the form <>, where <> represents the usual dot product, A is a matrix, and v is a vector. I didn't want to use complex numbers with what I was doing, so I assumed things were real valued. I was surprised by what happened as a result. I have simplified the curious behavior so that it can be observed in a few lines. I can live with this, but it was a surprise.

This recommendation was provided by Dr. Jürgen Gerhard, a colleague of mine at Maplesoft and coauthor of the book Modern Computer Algebra. He felt that Göttingen was definitely a center for German mathematics and science and well worth the visit if you are mathematically inclined. The city is located virtually in the geographic center of the country (in the state of Lower Saxony...

I've never been to Ireland, but this was the first thing that popped into my head when I heard of "mathematical tourism":

As the story goes (recounted here among other places), on October 16, 1843, the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton was walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin with his wife, when he invented the basic relation defining the quaternions. (He had previously been thinking about ways of extending the complex numbers to higher dimensions.) Supposedly, he was so excited by this that he carved i=j=k=ijk=-1 into nearby Brougham Bridge, which must have been one of the most spectacularly opaque pieces of graffiti in history. Unfortunately, there is no trace of such a carving now, but there is a plaque commemorating Hamilton's idea.

Licence: JP [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

According to the article, since 1989 mathematicians from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth have organized a pilgrimage from Dunsink Observatory to the bridge on the anniversary of Hamilton's discovery. So if you're ever in Dublin in October, you assuredly have someplace to go.

(But be sure not to commute there! :))

Hi. My name is Yu-Hong Wang and I work in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) group at Maplesoft. I'd like to generate some chatter about GUI's role in Maple 10. First some background about myself: I'm a CS grad who's been with the company in some form or another for nigh five years now.

I'm mainly a Mac guy. My affair with the fairer platform began thirteen years ago, and I've been developing on the Mac for close to ten years. I can still remember the days of Codewarrior, MPW, and Macsbug. Anyone care to A9F4? So by now, I hope that I've convinced you that I'm very much a fan of the Mac user experience.

Attached (sim.mpl) is a simple game simulation with data from last years World Series champion Red Sox. Bump up infolevel to see what's going on during a game (as shown below). In the "Maple Baseball" post I wanted to see if the number of runs our team was scoring was appropriate. Obviously, the rule of thumb, 3-hits = 1 run is poor at best. What I really want to find out is if there is a way to improve our scoring chances. The standard baseball batting-order uses the following heuristic:

• lead off with someone with a high on-base percentage (and who can maybe steal a base)
• next 2 are good contact hitters
• batter 4 is your "clean-up" hitter; someone with power
• etc.

Thanks for the considered words from Tom, Jim and Trogdor The Burninator, the origins of the name lost in the mists of time?! Tom mentioned several points that I'd like to comment on. The use of extra study books, written at a lower level, is a strategy that I see some local students use. Interstingly though its the more successful student who is using them. The student whom I encounter usually doesn't do this. They have the official text and maybe some printed lecture notes from the internet and thats it. I suspect in this case the problem isn't just the math but the concept of how to study math that is the problem.