Jacques posted a link to an interesting article in the New Yorker about feature creep. Perhaps we should ask whether Maple is suffering from this malady, but before doing so we really need to answer the question "what is Maple for?"

So here's a place to say what you think Maple's main purpose is/should be.

Here's my shot: Maple's prime purpose is to help teach math.

J.Tarr

I find that reading lots of help pages causes eye strain. A way of reducing this that works for me is to change the background color of the help pages from white to yellow. This can be done by setting HelpBGColor=255,255,224 in the ini file.

On Windows XP the ini file will be found at C:\Documents and Settings\Joe User\maple9.ini or maple10.ini. For Maple 11, the file can be found at C:\Documents and Settings\Joe User\Local Settings\Application Data\Maple\11\maple.ini

At what age do you think students should start learning and using Maple? What are your reasons?

Having looked recently at a suite of engineering software in use, I wondered whether engineers would need maths for much longer. Of course they’ll always need sufficient for business purposes, but my guess is maths will become unnecessary for engineering in much the same way as it’s unnecessary for weather forecasting. There would probably be a residual role for maths in engineering research, but not in the mainstream, and that would have huge implications for schools and universities. How do those engaged in teaching maths to budding engineers see the future?

There was a discussion on comp.soft-sys.maths.maple about how well Maple obtains the Jordan Normal Form of a (square) matrix. LinearAlgebra[JordanForm] is limited to matrices of integers, so it can make severe demands on computer memory; furthermore, in practice, one is often confronted with floating point data. However, linalg[jordan] operates on matrices of both integer and floating point data.

The following equation cannot be plotted correctly in the usual 3 dimensional plot with Cartesian coordinates.

eq := (x^2+y^2+z^2-1)^3 - x^2*z*3 - y^2*z^3 = 0;

Either a 3 dimensional implicit plot, or a spherical coordinates plot is needed. What surprised me was how long Maple 10.06 took to produce the latter with very roughly the same amount of detail as the former: 454 s versus 0.7 s.

It seems as though one should always prefer the implicit plot to the spherical plot if the 3 dimensional Cartesian plot fails. I would be grateful for any thoughts about this and any improvements to the code below. (Apologies for not posting the worksheet – I think that File Manager might object to its 10MB size!)

The question of how to scale the x-axis with intervals of Pi has been raised on a number of occasions. Inspired by a contribution from Will, I produced the procedure and examples shown in the worksheet attached below. Hopefully, Maple users will find it useful.

J. Tarr

View 724_Pi axes.mw on MapleNet or Download 724_Pi axes.mw
View file details