What is the Phi function.  And more importantly how do I find out in general waht a symbol represents.  I input Phi in help menu, nothing useful comes up.  I use Function advisor, don't see a Phi symbol or anything beginning with Phi.  Isn't there a way I can select the symbol in the output and get help on it by pressing a F key?

Ok so I try FunctionAdvisor(describe Phi) - it gives me general Lerch Phi function.  But when I go to help page on LerchPhi, nowhere does it use Greek letter Phi to describe the function.  So I finally figured it out as I was composing this question.  But in why does the help page not use the symbol for the function that is displayed in the worksheet?

I am having difficulty helping someone series expand an eigenvector solution.  I can expand the eigenvalues easily but get a numeric exception divide by zero when I attempt to expand a component of an eigenvector.  Mathematica seems to have no problem solving this problem.  Any help would be appreciated.

Download CourseraOpticsEigenvalues.mwCourseraOpticsEigenvalues.mw

After manually working out answer for problem 4-4 in Mathews & Walker's Mathematical Methods of Physics , I tried to check my solution with maple2015. Briefly the problem involves inputs periodic with period T, being transformed into outputs, through a kernal G.  The net result is that all input frequencies omega periodic in T are multiplied by (omega_0/omega)^2, except for constant frequency which transforms to zero.  The problem asks to evaluate the kernal G.

Maple2015 correctly evaluated the integral for a constant input, a cosine input, and a sine input, but gave undefined when I tried an exponential(i*x) input which is just a linear combination of the two previous inputs.  I found this interesting because the integral is finite, well defined, and only has an absolute function (in the kernal), which may cause Maple problems, as it correctly evaluated integral when I split it into two regions.  Interestingly if instead of working with a period of T, I used 2*pi, and redfined my G function accordingly, Maple evaluated the exp input integral without any problems.  So the problem appears to be with the T variable, but I correctly used assumptions of T>0, and 0<t<T, so I am not sure why it would work correctly when I use T=2*pi, but failed when using a general period T.  Any help would be welcome.

Download MathewsWalkerProblem4-4.mwMathewsWalkerProblem4-4.mw

in LinearAlgebra Eigenvectors calculation.

So the above output startled me.  I have used the Maple Linear Algebra Eigenvalues, Eigenvectors commands many times with no problem.  Can any one explain to me what is going on.  The program correctly calculates the eigenvalues for the matrix which are all distinct for a real symmetric matrix, and thus should have three distinct non-zero eigenvectors, yet the eigenvectore command returns only zeros for the eigenvectors.  I calculated an eigenvector by hand corresponding to the eigenvalue of 1 and obtained (1, -sqrt(2)/sqrt(3), -1/sqrt(3).

So this is either a serious bug or I am going completely insane. 

Why does my Maple 2015 constantly pause to redraw symbols in pinned palettes?  Really seems to slow down my use of the program.  Had this problem in previous versions also.  Using OSX Yosemite latest version.