We are pleased to announce that Maple 12 is now available.  It has some very cool new features - my personal favorites include the addition of polar plots, nifty new dials and gauges, a start-up code region, and the ability to use colour in table cells.  Check out our website to find out what’s new, to watch Maple 12 movies in the new Demo Center, for full details on upgrade specials and more.

Some time ago I was asked the question: do you know how to do a change of variables in a multi-dimensional definite integral?  I thought I knew, but I was wrong.  I only know how to do a change of variable in a multi-dimensional indefinite integral. 

Maple includes a useful StringTools:-Entropy procedure which computes the Shannon Entropy, or Information Entropy of a string.  Wikipedia has a nice article describing the measure online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_entropy.  I wanted to compute this value over a Matrix so I wrote the following procedure.  Let me know if you have any comments or improvements on the implementation.

For a bit of light relief, head on over to the online comic strip at phdcomics.com.  If you've ever been a PhD student, be careful, this strip might make the nightmares come back...

As Demmel and others have noted, SVD is both more reliable and more expensive than QR as a method of solving rank-deficient least squares problems.

SVD is the method that LinearAlgebra:-LeastSquares will choose when the Matrix has more columns than rows (n>m), unless instructed otherwise using the optional 'method' parameter.

LinearAlgebra:-SingularValues always computes a full U and Vt. But for least squares computations, such as when n>m, this is not necessary. Including the smaller singular values may just be (re-)introducing noise. See here for more detail.

Here's a 20x2000 example, using wrapperless external calling and the SVD routine dgesvd in the CLAPACK library. The effective speedup by using the Thin SVD for that 20x2000 least squares example is about a factor of 100 (ie, 2000/20), with a similar reduction in additional memory allocation.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the quarterly Maple Mentor Award for Jan.-Mar. 2008 is Jacques Carette, and the recipient of March's monthly award is Prof. Alejandro Jakubi. Jacques and Alejandro will receive prizes of their choice to thank them for their involvement with the MaplePrimes community. Congratulations to our winners!

My oldest son, Stuart, recently completed a Science Fair project on sudoku puzzles. While I am fairly good at solving sudoku puzzles, the mathematics is something that is completely outside my area of expertise. After seeing the paper by Hurzberg and Murty in the Notices of the AMS (June/July 2007) and additional papers by Felgenhauer and Jarvis (http://www.afjarvis.staff.shef.ac.uk/maths/felgenhauer_jarvis_spec1.pdf)  and Russell and Jarvis (http://www.afjarvis.staff.shef.ac.uk/maths/russell_jarvis_spec2.pdf) and Jarvis' sudoku webpage (http://www.afjarvis.staff.shef.ac.uk/sudoku/), I felt that I had a reasonable understanding of some of the basic ideas involved in counting unique sudoku puzzles. While I had nothing to add to the mathematical ideas, I did see the potential to create a tool to visualize these ideas. The result is the worksheet I just uploaded to MaplePrimes:

View 178_Sudoku3-20-03-08.mw on MapleNet or Download 178_Sudoku3-20-03-08.mw
View file details

A colleague showed this to me earlier this afternoon. I can explain, and accept, most of Maple's responses. I do have one case where I believe Maple could do better.

This arose during the creation of some Maple materials to support the derivation of the Integral Test for series convergence. Consider:

restart;
I1 := Int( 1/x^p, x=1..infinity );
                                /infinity      
                               |          1    
                               |          -- dx
                               |           p   
                              /1          x    

The time for Easter eggs will soon be here.

And using LibraryTools to browse and poke about in Maple's .mla files can show a few undocumented items.

Here's one below, that's an interesting part of a package.

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