MaplePrimes - Maple Calculator Posts and Questions

Maple Conference 2025: Full Program and Workshops

KaskaKowalska — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 13:34:36 Z

The full program for Maple Conference 2025 is now available.

The agenda includes two full days of keynote speakers, presentations from Maplesoft product directors and developers, and contributed talks by Maple users all around the world. There will be opportunities to network with fellow users, researchers, and Maplesoft staff.

The final day of the conference will include three in-depth workshops presented by the R&D team.
The workshops will explore how to:

Create papers and reports in Maple
Solve various differential equations more effectively using Maple's numerical solvers
Solve Advent of Code challenges using Maple

Access to the workshops is included with the free conference registration.

We hope to see you there!

Kaska Kowalska
Program Co-chair

Fostering Student Retention

eithne — Tue, 06 May 2025 17:21:36 Z

Maplesoft’s CEO, Dr. Laurent Bernardin, has written an opinion piece on Fostering Student Retention through Success in Mathematics. In it, he discusses ways to reduce university dropout rates by turning the technology shortcuts students are already using in their math courses into data-driven insights and interventions that promote student success.

You can read the whole article here: Fostering Student Retention through Success in Mathematics

You will not be shocked to learn that Maplesoft plays a role in the strategy he proposes. (But this is a serious problem for a lot of schools, and we really would like to help!)

Introducing Check My Work in Maple Calculator!

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 13:52:33 Z

As a university-level math student, I am constantly working through practice problems. An issue I constantly face is that when I get a problem wrong, it can be challenging to find out which line I did wrong. Even if I use Maple Calculator or Maple Learn to get the full steps for a solution, it can be tedious to compare my answer to the steps to see where I went wrong.

This is why Check My Work is one of the most popular features in Maple Learn. Check My Work will check all the lines in your solution and give you feedback showing you exactly where you went wrong. I honestly didn’t know that something like this existed until I started here at Maplesoft, and it is now easy to see why this has been one of our most successful features in Maple Learn.

Students have been loving it, but the only real complaint is that it’s only available in Maple Learn. So, if you were working on paper, you'd either have to retype your work into Maple Learn or take a picture of your steps using Maple Calculator and then access it in Maple Learn. Something I immediately thought was, if I’m already on my phone to take a picture, I’d much rather be able to stay on my phone.

And now you can! Check My Work is now fully available within Maple Calculator!

To use Check My Work, all you need to do is take a picture of your solution to a math problem.

Check My Work will recognize poor handwriting, so there is no need to worry about getting it perfect. After taking the picture, select the Check My Work dropdown in the results screen to see if your solution is correct or where you made a mistake.

Check My Work will go through your solution line-by-line giving you valuable feedback along the way! Additionally, if you make a mistake, Maple Calculator will point out the line with the error and then proceed with checking the remainder of the solution given this context.

For students, Check My Work is the perfect tool to help you understand and master concepts from class. As a student myself, I’ll for sure be using this feature in my future courses to double-check my work.

What makes Check My Work great for learning a technique is that it doesn’t tell you what mistake you made, but rather where the mistake has been made. This is helpful since as a student you don’t have to worry about the time-consuming task of finding the step with an error, but rather you can focus on the learning aspect of actually figuring out what you did wrong.

Once you have made corrections to your work on paper, take a new picture and repeat the process. You can also make changes to your solution in-app by clicking the “Check my work in editor” button in the bottom right, which runs Check My Work in the editor where you can modify your solution.

No other math tool has a Check My Work feature, and we are very proud to bring this very useful tool to students. By bringing it fully into Maple Calculator, we continue working towards our goal of helping students learn and understand math.

View the GIF below for a brief demonstration of how to use Check My Work!

We hope you enjoy Check My Work in Maple Calculator and let us know what you think!

Three cheers for the Maple Calculator!

rcorless — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 04:07:58 Z

I was working in my living room. My computer was upstairs, but I had my phone and tablet. I'm working on The Book ("Perturbation methods using backward error", with Nic Fillion, which will be published by SIAM next year some time).

I've discovered something quite cool, historically, about the WKB method and George Green's original invention of the idea (that bears other people's names, or, well, initials, anyway). (As usual.) Green had written down a PDE modelling waves in a long narrow canal of slowly varying breadth 2*beta(x) and slowly varying depth 2*gamma(x). Turns out his "approximate" solution is actually an exact solution to an equation of a very similar kind, with an extra term E(x)*phi(x,t). The extra term depends in a funny way on beta(x) and gamma(x), and only on those. So a natural kind of question is, "is there a canal shape for which Green's solution is the exact solution with E(x)==0?" Can we find beta(x) and gamma(x) for which this works?

Yes. Lots of cases. In particular, if the breadth beta(x) is constant, you can write down a differential equation for gamma(x). I wrote it in my notebook using y and not gamma. I wrote it pretty neatly. Then I fired up the Maple Calculator on my little tablet, opened the camera, and pow! Solved.

I wrote the solution down underneath the equation. It checks out, too. See the attached image.

Now, after the fact, I figured out how to solve it myself (using Ricatti's trick: put y' = v, then y'' = v*dv/dy, and the resulting first order equation is separable). But that whole "take a picture of the equation and write down the solution" thing is pretty impressive.

So: kudos to the designers and implementers of the Maple Calculator. Three cheers!

Introducing the Student Success Platform

Karishma — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:25:52 Z

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our new Student Success Platform! Over the past several months, our academic team has dedicated itself to understanding how we can better support institutions in addressing their concerns around student retention rates. The numbers tell a concerning story: In the U.S., nearly 25% of first-year undergraduates don’t complete their studies, and in STEM fields, the numbers are even higher. In both STEM programs and non-STEM programs with math gateway courses, struggles with math are often a key reason students do not, or cannot, continue their studies. This has a profound impact on both the students’ futures and the institution’s revenue and funding.

From what we’re hearing from institutions and instructors, one of the most pressing issues is the lack of readiness among first-year students, particularly in math courses. With larger class sizes and students arriving with varying levels of preparedness, instructors face challenges in providing the personalized support that is essential. Additionally, many students don’t fully utilize existing resources, such as office hours or TA sessions, which increases their risk of falling behind and ultimately dropping out.

Our new Student Success Platform is designed to tackle these issues head-on. It combines all of our existing tools with exciting new features to help students succeed on their own terms—without adding to instructors' already busy workloads. The early feedback has been fantastic, and we can’t wait for you to see the impact it can make.

You can read more about the Student Success Platform here: https://www.maplesoft.com/student-success-platform/

Purchase Code for Maple Calculator

JerithaVanniasinghe — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 21:25:24 Z

Where can I find my purchase code to complete the installation for Maple Calculator? I am not able to use it without one.