Scott, You could use identify to find the closed form from the numerical approximation produced by evalf. That yields 1/(2*Pi). Hope this helps J. Tarr

There are a number of suggestions about Maple documentation in the product improvement forum. Perhaps this thread belongs there. Or maybe Will could open up a new forum specifically for documentation. If he has the time available, it would be a great idea to move as many posts about documentation to a new Documentation forum as possible. Hope this helps, J. Tarr

Jacques, I'm with you 100% about documentation being Maple's weak spot, not just to newbies but to old hands too. A while back, there was a post asking about solving a pair of ODEs expressed in matrix and vector format. I thought that I remembered something about this, but could not find anything in the help pages. Acer provided a solution for the question and you remarked "wouldn't it be nice if Maple and dsolve understood the usual vector and matrix notation for systems of DEs, in the form that appears in most textbooks?" Just the other day I noticed a post that referred to "DEtools,matrixDE". That was what I had been looking for and probably what you had in mind. How many newbies would think of searching under that heading? And why matrix and not Matrix? And why have both DEtools and DETools? Good luck, J. Tarr

Acer, You will find the evaluation rules for tables, arrays, etc at ?last_name_eval. This also gives links to spec_eval_rules and eval. I fully agree with your point that the subject should be better documented. As I have suggested in other threads, the help pages really need re-writing and some kind of thesaurus should be provided and the rather "fussy" help search engine should be replaced. J. Tarr

V. Bondarenko has his, at times irritating, say on unmoderated sites such as comp.soft-sys.math.maple. I guess the ever-vigilant Will would soon cut VB's diatribes here and deny him access. It would be interesting to learn whether Maplesoft's bug hunters ever "tune in" to VB. He does make some good points about bugs continuing from one version of Maple to the next. Trouble is picking up the signal amidst all the noise. J. Tarr

There’s been scant response from the ranks of academe to these questions. Yet, they have the greatest experience of imparting math to students and their opinions should weigh the most. J. Tarr

My copy of Maple 10.06 has a help page for curry and rcurry. Perhaps your help pages have been damaged? J. Tarr

My copy of Maple 10.06 has a help page for curry and rcurry. Perhaps your help pages have been damaged? J. Tarr

DJ Keenan, Thank you for your opinion, but I do not see it being supported by engineers or their educators in the future. Quite apart from anything else, more and more engineering subjects have to be crammed into a fixed-length period of study. Something will have to yield. Regards, J. Tarr

I used Maple V R4 to run the codes for which you asked timings on an old machine (450MHz, 125 MB RAM, Win 98). They ran like greased lightening, scoring zero times except for gerdt which gave 0.006 sec. I couldn't run them on Maple 11 on the same machine, but I hope this is of some use. Regards, J. Tarr

Jacques and DJ Keenan know a great deal about math and computation, but perhaps rather less about engineers and engineering. First of all, engineers are interested in making or repairing things, and much less in the mathematics, which is only a tool. In that process, the engineer asks questions, weighs the answers and decides what to do. The bit between the questions and the answers may be occupied by math, or experiments, or both. Because engineered things are complicated, hand calculations rely on lots of simplifying assumptions e.g. a perfectly straight rod, uniform properties, zero flux leakage, etc. Mostly, they are "cookbook" calculations from design codes or engineering books. The simplifications are then covered by factors of safety, or by design codes, that embody accumulated experience and the reality is approximated during experiments with the article, or a model of it. In many cases, the math can only be done by specialized software, such as Finite Element Analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics packages, that solve the approximate equations at very many nodes of a suitably constructed mesh. The engineer’s interest in such cases is choosing the most suitable package and ensuring the mesh encompasses all the relevant parts of the structure, or flow, and that the assumptions are reasonably realistic. In some cases, the engineer has no choice – a codification authority dictates it. A “simple” example is the structural design of very tall buildings and, much more difficult, prediction of the effects of fire in them. My analogy with weather forecasting was deliberate. It is impractical to forecast the weather using hand calculations: it has to be done by very powerful machines using sophisticated software. The weatherman couldn’t do the math and doesn’t need to; his job is to interpret the results produced by the computer. Engineers are becoming like the weatherman, except that they also have to choose the right software, pose the right questions for the computer to answer, and then decide what should be done if the answers are not satisfactory. Eventually, mathematics may become unnecessary for most engineers, except for those doing research and those developing engineering software. That would have a big effect on schools and universities. J. Tarr

You only need to read the requirements for Maple 11, 10, et al to know that they are not yet Vista ready. Maplesoft has made it plain that an update for Maple 11 will be published soon (what about Maple 10 etc?) That said, Maplesoft's planning leaves much to be desired and they have allowed their arch competitor to beat them hands down. J. Tarr

If you can see maplew.exe in the C:\Program Files\Maple 10\bin.win file, try clicking on it. That should fire up Maple, which would tell you there was something wrong with the icons that point to it. Hope this helps, J. Tarr

Could be a firewall problem. There's advice at Maplesoft customer support FAQ Enter Firewall in the query box and that will produce a list of 4 FAQs. The second is the most helpful. Good luck, J. Tarr

In my opinion, Maple could be made much easier to learn and use by: 1. Changing to a Google or "fuzzy" type search for the help pages. 2. Including a "Thesaurus" of Maple help. That's partly there in some help pages in the shape of the hyperlinks at the bottom of the page and partly there in the help tree. But it needs extending and that would make some help pages and the tree very unwieldy. So a free-standing Thesaurus as in a word processor is probably the way to go. 3. Comprehensively re-writing the help pages. The style and content of existing help pages is very inconsistent: some are too skimpy, others look like a dissertation for the MAA. Help pages are very difficult to do well and in-house resources seldom have the techniques and experience needed. So this could be quite an expensive item. But it would pay for itself in the long-run with better sales of Maple. J. Tarr