Maplesoft Blogger Profile: Tom Lee

I had originally planned for a light-hearted post on a recent customer visit that I recently made in Europe but in light of the events in Japan these past few days, it somehow seemed terribly inappropriate. Around the world, people are coming to grips with this recent series of disasters, but for us at Maplesoft, being part of the global Cybernet corporate team, there are very personal dimensions.

The good news is that all of our colleagues at Cybernet Systems, headquartered...

My father’s first car when our family moved to North America was a 1970 Buick Skylark sedan, and the color was a majestic deep green. I was seven years old at the time and this was my first experience with a green car. It’s ironic that my life in North America started with a green car and has come full circle with green cars all over the place as far as my job is concerned. But of course, today’s green car is really about highly fuel efficient cars...

Like many in the technology industry, I am a big fan of science fiction films and I’ve written in the past about how exciting it is for me to have a job where science fiction and reality literally meet. Over the past few months, several key projects from various Maple and MapleSim users caught my attention for various reasons and once again, I was forced to giggle publicly as the shear cool factor of these applications overcame my normal mature demeanor.

One of the best things about growing up in the “Hood” is that it feels really good when you leave. I grew up in a neighborhood called Downsview in Toronto whose claim to fame used to be it was the home to the DeHavilland Aircraft company but today is more associated with ongoing issues of crime, poverty, and many other urban illnesses. So every time I hear that someone from the Hood did something great, I take notice and I take special pride. This is the story about...

A sign of a very successful period of work is the tally of how many email messages I’ve written that start with … “First, let me apologize for the delay in my response…” Yes, if you are the recipient of one of these notes from me, you’re probably more annoyed than pleased that I’m finding lots of very interesting things to fill up my ever-shrinking Outlook schedule. It’s been one heck of a summer, and I’m behind on countless...

This week, I had the pleasure of attending a rock concert with my son Eric who is now about to turn 15 and who has turned out to possess non-trivial interests and talents in music. The concert was by the band Rush who, to the uninitiated, would be yet another big, loud, over-produced rock band. But to a generation of technocrats (e.g. yours truly) educated from the late 1970’s and on, they are the band of choice due to an intriguing mix of musicianship, technological...

The term “from months to days” is a favorite slogan of mine and I have relied on it religiously for over two decades to illustrate the fundamental benefit of symbolic computation. Whether it’s the efficient development of complex physical models using MapleSim, or exploration of parametric design surface equations (my dissertation) using good old fashioned Maple V Release 2, the punch that symbolic computation provided was to automate the algebraic mechanics...

My wife will testify that I am horrible when it comes to keeping things organized and tidy. My colleagues who have seen my office can attest to this as well. My usual defence is that a messy environment is an indication of how busy you are (consequently how productive you are) and basic creativity. But every once in a while, usually when I hit a mental block, I launch into clean up mode to do something completely different hoping that when I’m done, my mental block will be gone. I just went through one of these moments. This time, my cleansing took me to the bottom of one of my office desk drawers to a pile of photos that I had stashed in there ten years ago. Glancing through these, four immediately jumped out and helped me flash back to some key moments in my life. Yes, my 15 minute sabbatical digging through my desk was one of the most productive quarter hours I’ve had in a long time. Here, then, are these four photos that respectively offer a compelling reason to reflect a bit on the past ...

I have to thank my friend John Wass, an editor from Scientific Computing magazine who began a recent article with the clear warning “Attention Engineers! The developers at Maplesoft rarely sit still for very long.”  This was a comment on the thrilling speed that enhancements are flowing from the MapleSim pipeline. Although his quote refers to a MapleSim 3 article he wrote, I chuckled as the sentiment still rings true as my colleagues and I catch our breaths after the recent release of MapleSim 4.  Yes, the engineering community has definitely taken notice that MapleSim, in such a short amount of time, is already making a big difference in the way we do and think about modeling.

After years of dreaming, planning, scheming, and hoping, my family, as a single entity, finally made it to Asia for a holiday. In our region, school children typically enjoy a mid March “Break”. This usually means families packing up their minivans and driving to Florida or other warm places to help them forget the bleakness of the Canadian winter.  This year, however, the spring winds took my family to Asia – Japan and Korea to be specific. I was born in Korea but moved to Canada in 1971 when I was 7 years old. And those of you who have glanced at my past posts know that I’ve been a frequent business visitor to Japan many times over the years. But a family trip to these dynamic places is a completely different experience. There is something remarkable about the discovery experience you get as a pure tourist where issues of punctuality and protocol disappear and you’re left with the experience in its most raw and engaging forms.

I’ve written in the past of how the push for more efficient, “greener” designs are driving innovation in important industries like auto, aerospace, and power.  Over the past few years, we’ve met countless engineers around the world who are working hard to transform conventional designs to highly refined optimal designs in tune with modern realities, and some are, of course, throwing out old ideas all together and venturing into exotic power sources and radical platforms that used to be the stuff of science fiction. Last week I had one of the more interesting and enjoyable encounters with such a group of very talented green engineers.

I’ve always been a big fan of languages and even a bigger fan of those who readily master multiple languages with relative ease. My late brother was a linguist with a minimum of five or so distinct languages in his portfolio. Yes, there were many things that I thought I could do better, but that one gift of his was the thing that I would remember him by as time went on.  The other day, my son Eric asked me for advice on what courses to take in Grade 10. He essentially had three electives and, as with most public schools in our country, there were countless choices, all of which sounded tantalizingly interesting and enriching. In the end he came to the conclusion (OK, I drove him to the conclusion), that French, German, and Computer Science would be the right choices.

In his last blog post “Watching the Dawn”, Fred Kern comments on the life of an engineer before the realization that symbolic approaches to computing can get you better results faster. The analogy is, of course, prior to this revelation we were in some sense in the dark. I’d like to add my two cents worth as I was indeed one of those engineers lurking in the dark for many years.

Flash back about 20 or so years.  I was a poor graduate student and to feed myself, I began doing small jobs for this new company called Waterloo Maple Software (which eventually became Maplesoft).  Mostly, my work was to develop small applications or demonstrations with an engineering focus.  I remember with great fondness, the look of shock and awe that would come over my engineering colleagues’ faces when I showed them how I computed symbolic matrix products or performed a cumbersome simplification in seconds. For me, it was an obvious thing to do because I had access to the technology and I didn’t know any better. But for them, it seemed like pure voodoo. But in reality, the common themes that I somehow fumbled upon during these early presentations would later reappear in much richer, exciting forms as core themes in the eventual “symbolic sunrise” twenty years later.

Although the digital world has provided me with a wonderful career and countless enriching experiences, in my heart I will always have a special passion towards the analog world: vinyl LP’s, multiple print sets of the Encyclopædia Britannica, a manual wind watch, fountain pens, film cameras and a darkroom, and carbureted motorcycles all have privileged spots in my house. With digital equivalents being so much more accurate, faster, convenient, and cheaper, what could possibly be the appeal of these ancient artifacts?

There is something profoundly satisfying when something that goes “viral” on the Web has some connection to your life. This happened recently when I and my colleagues were pointed towards a video of some laboratory robots that somehow drew almost a million views on YouTube alone. For an engineer,...