We have issued an update to correct a problem a small number of Mac and 64-bit Linux users have experienced when doing certain types of floating point computations on very recent hardware (such as this report on MaplePrimes: http://www.mapleprimes.com/questions/201815-Problem-Loading-MKL-In-Maple-18). When the problem occurs, instead of giving the result, Maple issues a “lost kernel connection” error message and must be restarted.

While this issue does not occur on most computers, we recommend that all Maple 18 customers running on Mac or 64-bit Linux install this update to ensure they do not encounter this problem. This update can be safely applied to any Mac or 64-bit Linux computer. Windows and 32-bit Linux users do not need, and cannot install, this update.

To get this update, you can use Tools>Check for Updates from within Maple, or visit Maple 18.01a Downloads.

eithne

Maplesoft regularly hosts live webinars on a variety of topics. Below you will find details on some upcoming webinars we think may be of interest to the MaplePrimes community.  For the complete list of upcoming webinars, visit our website.

Bring Statistics Education to Life!

This exciting new webinar will demonstrate some of the ways that educators can take advantage of Maple’s symbolic and numeric approach for statistics education. Examples will include basic statistics theory including descriptive statistics such as measures of central tendency and spread, hypothesis testing, as well as discrete and continuous random variables.

Many examples presented in this webinar will be taken from the new Student Statistics package that was introduced in Maple 18. The Student Statistics was designed with classroom use in mind, and features detailed explanations and instructions, interactive demonstrations, and visualizations, all of which are great learning tools for teaching a course involving probability and statistics.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

Symbolic Computing for Engineering

As engineering applications become more complex, it is becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy the often-conflicting project constraints using traditional tools. As a result, we’ve found there is a growing interest within the engineering community for tools that make engineering calculations transparent and capture not just results but also the knowledge and analysis used throughout the engineering workflow. Engineering organizations are achieving this goal by making symbolic techniques an integral part of their tool set.

In this webinar, Laurent Bernardin will demonstrate how to enhance the early-stage design phase by making mathematical computations explicit and transparent, and then integrating the results into an existing tool chain.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

Maplesoft regularly hosts live webinars on a variety of topics. Below you will find details on some upcoming webinars we think may be of interest to the MaplePrimes community.  For the complete list of upcoming webinars, visit our website.

Bring Statistics Education to Life!

This exciting new webinar will demonstrate some of the ways that educators can take advantage of Maple’s symbolic and numeric approach for statistics education. Examples will include basic statistics theory including descriptive statistics such as measures of central tendency and spread, hypothesis testing, as well as discrete and continuous random variables.

Many examples presented in this webinar will be taken from the new Student Statistics package that was introduced in Maple 18. The Student Statistics was designed with classroom use in mind, and features detailed explanations and instructions, interactive demonstrations, and visualizations, all of which are great learning tools for teaching a course involving probability and statistics.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

Symbolic Computing for Engineering

As engineering applications become more complex, it is becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy the often-conflicting project constraints using traditional tools. As a result, we’ve found there is a growing interest within the engineering community for tools that make engineering calculations transparent and capture not just results but also the knowledge and analysis used throughout the engineering workflow. Engineering organizations are achieving this goal by making symbolic techniques an integral part of their tool set.

In this webinar, Laurent Bernardin will demonstrate how to enhance the early-stage design phase by making mathematical computations explicit and transparent, and then integrating the results into an existing tool chain.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

We have just released an all-new, second edition of the Calculus Study Guide.

This guide has been completely rewritten and greatly expanded and to take full advantage of Maple’s Clickable Math approach.  It covers all of Calculus I and Calculus II and has over 450 worked examples, the vast majority of which are solved using interactive, Clickable Math techniques. 

Not only is this guide useful for students learning calculus, but it can also serve as a guide for instructors interested in pursuing a syntax-free approach to using Maple in their teaching.

See Clickable Calculus Study Guide for more information.  For even more information, you could also attend a live webinar about the new study guide next Wednesday.

eithne

Maplesoft regularly hosts live webinars on a variety of topics. Below you will find details on some upcoming webinars we think may be of interest to the MaplePrimes community.  For the complete list of upcoming webinars, visit our website.

Hollywood Math (with more new examples!)

Over its storied and intriguing history, Hollywood has entertained us with many mathematical moments in film. John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind,” the brilliant janitor in “Good Will Hunting,” the number theory genius in “Pi,” and even Abbott and Costello are just a few of the Hollywood “mathematicians” that come to mind.

Although the widespread presentation of mathematics on the silver screen is not always entirely accurate, it does serve as a great introduction to the study of mathematics in general. During this webinar Maplesoft will present a number of examples of mathematics in film. See relevant, exciting examples that you can use to engage your students.At the end of the webinar you’ll be given an opportunity to download an application containing all of the Hollywood examples that we demonstrate.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

Applications of Symbolic Computation in Control Design

You may already use Maple and/or MapleSim within your organization to solve various problems, but did you know that they have capabilities for control design as well? In one of our upcoming featured webinars for this month, we will explore the Control Design toolbox including the ability to extract symbolic equations of plant models, perform symbolic linearization, design symbolic controllers, and generate very fast code for HIL testing.

The following examples will be demonstrated:

• PID Control

• LQR, Kalman filter design

• Gain scheduling

• Feedback linearization

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

Updates are now available for both Maple 18 and MapleSim 6.4.

Maple 18.01 includes a variety of enhancements, including:

• Significantly enhanced  efficiency for many  numerical linear algebra computations
• New keyboard shortcuts for “Execute All” ([Ctrl or Cmd]+[Shift]+[Enter]) and for entering slideshow mode ([F11] or [Cmd]+[F11])
• Improved export of 2-D plots
• PDF export improvements for documents that include  code edit regions
• Enhancements to the limit command

 To get this update, you can use Tools>Check for Updates from within Maple, or visit Maple 18.01 Downloads.

MapleSim 6.4.01 includes:

• Improvements to the templates for creating custom components using discrete state space and discrete transfer function descriptions
• Improved handling of variable names that include both symbols and numbers
• UTF-8 filename support
• Improved backwards compatibility of the Parameter Inspector with older models

In MapleSim, use  Help>Check for Updates or visit MapleSim 6.4.01 Update. For best performance, we recommend that you run MapleSim 6.4.01 with Maple 18.01.

eithne

Updates are now available for both Maple 18 and MapleSim 6.4.

Maple 18.01 includes a variety of enhancements, including:

• Significantly enhanced  efficiency for many  numerical linear algebra computations
• New keyboard shortcuts for “Execute All” ([Ctrl or Cmd]+[Shift]+[Enter]) and for entering slideshow mode ([F11] or [Cmd]+[F11])
• Improved export of 2-D plots
• PDF export improvements for documents that include  code edit regions
• Enhancements to the limit command

 To get this update, you can use Tools>Check for Updates from within Maple, or visit Maple 18.01 Downloads.

MapleSim 6.4.01 includes:

• Improvements to the templates for creating custom components using discrete state space and discrete transfer function descriptions
• Improved handling of variable names that include both symbols and numbers
• UTF-8 filename support
• Improved backwards compatibility of the Parameter Inspector with older models

In MapleSim, use  Help>Check for Updates or visit MapleSim 6.4.01 Update. For best performance, we recommend that you run MapleSim 6.4.01 with Maple 18.01.

eithne

I think we all know the routine. We walk to a large classroom, we sit down for a test, we receive a large stack of questions stapled together and then we fill in tiny bubbles on a separate sheet that is automatically graded by a scanning machine. We’ve all been there. I was thinking recently about how far the humble multiple choice question has come over the last few years with the advent of systems like Maple T.A., and so I did a little research.

Multiple choice questions were first widely-distributed during World War I to test the intelligence of recruits in the United States of America. The army desired a more efficient way of testing as using written and oral evaluations was very time consuming. Dr. Robert Yerkes, the psychologist who convinced the army to try a multiple choice test, wanted to convince people that psychiatry could be a scientific study and not just philosophical. A few years later, SATs began including multiple choice questions. Since then, educational institutions have adopted multiple choice questions as a permanent tool for many different types of assessments.

One of the biggest advances in the use of multiple choice questions was the birth of automatic grading through the use of machine-readable papers. These grew in popularity during the mid-70s as teachers and instructors saved time by not having to grade answer sheets manually.

Until recently, there has not been much advancement in this area.  It’s true, Maple T.A. can do so much more than just multiple choice questions, so this style of question is less important in large-scale testing than it used to be. But multiple choice questions still have their place in an automated testing system, where uses include leveraging older content, easily detecting patterns of misunderstanding, requiring students to choose from different images, and minimizing student interaction with the system. Luckily, Maple T.A. takes even the humble multiple choice questions to the next level. Now you might be thinking, how is that even possible given the basic structure of multiple choice questions? What could possibly be done to enhance them?

Well, for starters, in Maple T.A., you can permute the answers. This means you have the option to change the order of the choices for each student. This is also possible with machine-readable papers, but this does require multiple solution sets for a teacher or instructor to keep track of. With Maple T.A., everything is done for you. For example, if you have a multiple choice question in Maple T.A. with 5 answer choices, there are 120 different possible answer orders that students can be presented with. You don’t have to keep track of extra solution sets or note which test version each student is receiving. Maple T.A. takes care of it all.

Maple T.A. allows you to create Algorithmic questions - multiple choice questions in which you can vary different values in your question. And you aren’t limited to selecting values from a specific range, either. For example, you can select a random integer from a pre-defined list, a random number that satisfies a mathematical condition, such as ‘divisible by 3’ or ‘prime’, or even a random polynomial or matrix with specific characteristics. It allows an instructor to create a single question template, but have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of possible question outcomes based on the randomly selected values for the algorithmic variables. The algorithmic variables not only apply to the question being asked by a student, but also the choices they see in a multiple choice question.

You can even create a question where every student gets the same fixed list of choices, but the question varies to ensure that the correct response changes.  That’s going to confuse some students who are doing a little more “collaboration” than is appropriate!

Some of the other advantages of using Maple T.A. for multiple choice are also common to all Maple T.A. question types. For example, you can provide instant, customized feedback to your students. If a student gets a multiple choice question correct, you can provide feedback showing the solution (who is to say the student didn’t guess and get this question correct?) If a student gets a multiple choice question incorrect, you can provide targeted feedback that depends on which response they chose. This allows you to customize exactly what a student sees in regards to feedback without having to write it out by hand each time.

And of course, like in other Maple T.A. questions, multiple choice questions can include mathematical expressions, plots, images, audio clips, videos, and more – in the questions and in the responses.      

Finally, let’s not forget, in an online testing environment, there is no panic when you realized you accidently skipped line 2 while filling out your card, no risk of paper cuts, and no worrying about what kind of pencil to use!

References:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/dark-history-of-multiple-choice-ainissa-ramirez

http://xkcd.com/499/

http://io9.com/5908833/the-birth-of-scantrons-the-bane-of-standardized-testing

As a reminder, we regularly host live webinars on a variety of topics for our customers, and we wanted to make this information available to the MaplePrimes community as well.

This featured webinar for this month will outline the Finance Package in Maple 18 including capabilities like the mathematical, statistical, and connectivity tools required to analyse data, calculate forecasts, estimate risks, prototype and develop quantitative algorithms, and leverage parallel programming techniques.

Other topics include:

• Data feed connectivity and system integration

• Price equity and interest rate derivatives

• Populate reporting tools, deliver documents and share worksheets

• Optimize portfolios of financial instruments

• High-Performance Computing (HPC)

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

For some time I have been running into the problem where uploaded worksheets that are inlined into a Mapleprimes post get gridlines shown, even when they are not specified or shown in the original worksheet. This is a problem because quite often the gridlines make an inlined plot unattractive.

I believe that Mapleprimes uses some version of MapleNet as a mechanism for inlining uploaded worksheets.

It seems that the Standard GUI and/or MapleNet have special handling for gridlines in the sense that they actually distinguish between PLOT structures generated without the `gridlines` option versus those created with `gridlines=false`.  I believe that this has something to do with the persistence of various plot qualities in an output region which (perhaps for historical reasons?)  allow re-execution of a plot input command to produce a plot output rendering that remembers whether gridlines are visible.

If the second plot below does indeed get rendered here in Primes without gridlines visible then one workaround is evident: adding `gridlines=false` instead of omitting the option.

Download test.mw

I'll submit a bug report against MapleNet.

acer

MapleSim 6.4 includes more powerful tools for creating custom components, performance enhancements, and enhancements to the model generators for Simulink® and FMI. 

We have also made important updates to the MapleSim Control Design Toolbox. This toolbox now offers a more complete set of algorithms for PID control, new commands for computing closed-loop transfer functions, and numerous improvements to existing commands. These enhancements allow engineers to design a greater variety of controllers and controller-observer systems while taking advantage of the greater flexibility and analysis options available through the use of symbolic parameters. 

See What’s New in MapleSim 6.4 and What’s New in the MapleSim Control Design Toolbox for details.

eithne

Maplesoft is holding its first ever Virtual User Summit on Feb. 27.  You’ll be able to watch presentations by both Maplesoft and Maplesoft customers, ask questions, have discussions in the lounge with other attendees, and even enter a draw, all from the comfort of your own home or office.

Here’s the agenda.  We’ll release more detailed information on speakers and session times in the next couple of weeks.

For more information and to register:  Maplesoft Virtual User Conference

We're looking forward to seeing you there. (Well, "seeing you" :-))

eithne

It is a relatively recent innovation that complex-number computations can be done in the evalhf environment. When combined with plots:-densityplot, this makes escape-time fractals in the complex domain very easy to plot. This fractal is based on the Collatz problem. This Wikipedia article has a high-resolution picture of this fractal. I've switched the real and imaginary axes and reversed the direction of the real axis purely for asthetic reasons.

Download Collatz_fractal.mw

MapleSim 6.3 includes substantial improvements to the MapleSim simulation engine, resulting in faster model pre-processing times, more flexible code generation, and expanded support for Modelica-based custom components. 

For more information, see What’s New in MapleSim.

eithne

Greetings to all.

As some of you may remember I made several personal story type posts concerning my progress in solving enumeration problems with the Polya Enumeration Theorem (PET). This theorem would seem to be among the most exciting in mathematics and it is of an amazing simplicity so that I never cease to suggest to mathematics teachers to present it to gifted students even before university. My previous efforts are documented at your site, namely at this MaplePrimes link I and this MaplePrimes link II.

I have been able to do another wonderful cycle index computation using Maple recently and I would like to share the Maple code for this problem, which is posted at Math StackExchange.com (this post includes the code) This time we are trying to compute the cycle index of the automorphism group of the 3-by-3-by-3 cube under rotations and reflections. I suggest you try this problem yourself before you look at my solution. Enjoy!

I mentioned in some of my other posts concerning PET that Maple really ought to come with a library of cycle indices and the functions to manipulate them. I hope progress has been made on this issue. I had positive feedback on this at the time here at your website. Do observe that you have an opportinuity here to do very attractive mathematics if you prepare a worksheet documenting cycle index facilities that you may eventually provide. This is good publicity owing to the fact that you can include images of the many geometric objects that appear which all look quite enticing and moreover potential readers get rewarded quickly as they discover that it takes little effort to master this theorem and proceed to work with symmetries themselves and investigate them. This sort of thing also makes nice slides.

With best wishes for happy combinatorics computing,

Marko Riedel