I would like to pay attention to a series of applications by Samir Khan
http://www.maplesoft.com/applications/view.aspx?SID=153600
http://www.maplesoft.com/applications/view.aspx?SID=153599
http://www.maplesoft.com/applications/view.aspx?SID=153596
http://www.maplesoft.com/applications/view.aspx?SID=153598
My congratulations to the author on his work well done. New capacities of Global Optimization Toolbox are spectacular. For example, in the first application  an optimization
problem in 101 variables under 5050 nonlinear  constraints
(other than 202 bounds) is solved.
I think it requires a very powerful comp and much time.
I tried that  problem for n=20 with the good old DirectSearch
on my comp (4 GB RAM, Pentium Dual-Core CPU E5700@3GHz) by

soln2 := DirectSearch:-GlobalSearch(rc, {cons1, cons2, rc >= 0,
seq(`and`(vars[i] >= -70, vars[i] <= 70), i = 1 .. 2*n), rc <= 70},
variables = vars, method = quadratic, number = 140, solutions = 1,
evaluationlimit = 20000)

and obtained not so bad rc=69.9609360106765 (whereas www.packomania.com gives rc=58.4005674790451137175957) in about one hour.

Packing_by_DS.mw
For n=50 the memory of my comp cannot allocate calculations or the obtained result by the Search command is far away from the one in packomania.

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

Hollywood Math 2

In this second installment of the Hollywood Math webinar series, we will present some more examples of mathematics being used in Hollywood films and popular hit TV series. For instance, have you wondered how Ben Campbell solved his professor’s challenge so easily in the movie “21”? Or about the details of the Nash equilibrium that John Nash first developed in a “A Beautiful Mind”? We’ve got the answers! These relevant, and exciting examples can be used as material to engage your students with examples familiar to them, or you can just attend the webinar for its entertainment value.

Anyone with an interest in mathematics, especially high school and early college math educators, will be both entertained and informed by attending this webinar. At the end of the webinar you’ll be given an opportunity to download an application containing all of the examples that we demonstrate.

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

If you missed the first webinar in this two part series, you can view the 'Hollywood Math' recording on our website.

The Interactive Embedded Components in Physics are of great importance today and will be even more in the future. Hereand leave a small tutorial of Embedded Components in Physics applied to physics. I hope that somehow you motives to continue the development of science.

  Interactive_Embedded_Components_in_Physics.mw      (in spanish)                 

 Ponencia_CRF.pdf

Atte.

Lenin Araujo Castillo

Physics Pure

Computer Science

To calculate the day of the week for a given date, first of all we need to find out the number of odd days.

Today I thought of sharing a beautiful problem I learned in my school, though it is easy, it is tricky too.
Odd Days are number of days more than the complete number of weeks in given period.
Leap Year is the year which is divisible by 4.
A normal year has 365 days
A leap year has 366 days
One normal year = 365 days = 52weeks + 1day
One normal year has one odd day

One leap year = 366 days = 52weeks + 2days
One leap year has two odd days

100 years = 76 ordinary years + 24 leap years = 5200 weeks + 124 days = 5217 weeks + 5 days
100 years have 5 odd days

400 years have (20+1) 0 odd days

The number of odd days and the corresponding day of the week is given below

0-Sunday
1-Monday
2-Tuesday
3-Wednesday
4-Thursday
5-Friday
6-Saturday

So by finding out the number of odd days you can find out the day of the week. I hope this procedure Will be helpful in solving math problems in exams.

Thanks.

Announcing the 2014 Maple T.A. User Summit

Maplesoft will be hosting the 2014 Maple T.A. User Summit this October 22-24 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This conference discusses important trends in education, how technology is changing, and what all this means for educators and students. This is an opportunity for Maple T.A. users to learn first-hand how Maple T.A. is transforming testing and assessment, and non-users can also benefit by learning about current and future trends in online education.

Conference highlights include:

• Expert advice from long term users on how they’re using Maple T.A.
• Comprehensive hands-on Maple T.A. training
• Demonstration of new features in Maple T.A., and where the technology is heading
• Social events with Maplesoft staff and other educators from around the world

We invite users who are using Maple T.A. in an innovative way in their classroom to submit a presentation proposal by July 15th, 2014. For details, please visit: https://webstore.maplesoft.com/taconference/MapleTA_Summit_CFP.pdf

For more details, preliminary agenda, and to register, please visit our website: https://webstore.maplesoft.com/taconference/  

Jonny
Maplesoft Product Manager, Maple T.A.

Here in this work and used as the main topic a short description of electrostatics and electrodynamics using the Explore to model the fundamental laws command.

 Corriente_Eléctrica.mw   (in spanish)

Atte.

L. Araujo C.

With this contribution we opened a breach in the proper use of the program applied Thermodynamics.

Introducción_a_la_Termodinámica.mw     (in spanish)

Hi,
The FunctionAdvisor project is currently developing at full speed. During the last two months, a significant amount of new conversion routines and mathematical information for Jacobi elliptic and Jacobi Theta functions, on identities, periodicity, transformations, etc. got added to the conversion network for mathematical functions and to the FunctionAdvisor. The previous months was the turn of the set of complex components, added to the network. Developments regarding the simplification and integration of special functions (e.g SphericalY for computing spherical harmonics or Dirac), as well as fixes to the numerical evaluation of JacobiAM, `assuming` and to differential equation subroutines are also part of the update.

These developments are available to everybody as usual in the Maplesoft R&D Differential Equations and Mathematical Functions webpage. Below there is a list of the latest developments as seen in the worksheet that comes in the zip with the DEsAndMathematicalFunctions update.

Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab
Physics, Differential Equations and Mathematical Functions, Maplesoft

Greetings to all.

As some of you may remember I have posted several announcements concerning Power Group Enumeration and the Polya Enumeration Theorem this past year, e.g. at this MaplePrimes link: Power Group Enumeration.

I have continued to work in this field and for those of you who have followed the earlier threads I would like to present some links to my more recent work using the Burnside lemma. Of course all of these are programmed in Maple and include the Maple code and it is with the demonstration of Maple's group theory capabilities in mind that I present them to you (math.stackexchange links).

• Power Group Enumeration with two instances of the symmetric group by Burnside
• Multisets of n permutations of [n] with the symmetric group acting on the permutation elements
• Counting binary structures
• Primitive necklaces, the Mobius function, and Power Group Enumeration
• Edge colorings of the cube and Power Group Enumeration
• Counting functions by Simultaneous Power Group Enumeration
• Subsets of a standard 52 card deck wrt. suit permutation
• Systems of lottery tickets wrt. the symmetric group acting on the values
• Stirling numbers and Power Group Enumeration
• Binary matrices with a fixed number of ones per column under row and column permutations

The third and fourth to last link in particular include advanced Maple code.

The second entry is new as of October 30 2015.

With my best wishes for happy group theory computing with Maple,

Regards,

Marko Riedel

I learned about this problem from Aser's post   See  page of tasks still without  Maple implementation. 

The procedure  game24  solves the problem. In the procedure Acer's  procedure  MyHandler is  used, which prevents the program to stop in case of 0 in the denominator.

game24:=proc(a,b,c,d)

local MyHandler,It, K, M, i, P;

uses StringTools, combinat;

 MyHandler := proc(operator,operands,default_value)

      NumericStatus( division_by_zero = false );

      return infinity;

   end proc;

   NumericEventHandler(division_by_zero=MyHandler); 

It:=proc(L1,L2)

local i, j, L;

L:=[];

for i in L1 do

for j in L2 do

L:=[op(L), op([Substitute(Substitute("( i + j )","i",convert(i,string)),"j",convert(j,string)),Substitute(Substitute("( i - j )","i",convert(i,string)),"j",convert(j,string)),Substitute(Substitute("( i * j )","i",convert(i,string)),"j",convert(j,string)),Substitute(Substitute("( i / j )","i",convert(i,string)),"j",convert(j,string))])];

od; od;

L;

end proc; 

P:=permute([a,b,c,d]); 

K:=[];

for i in P do

K:=[op(K),op(It(It(It([i[1]],[i[2]]),[i[3]]),[i[4]])), op(It(It([i[1]],It([i[2]],[i[3]])),[i[4]])), op(It([i[1]],It(It([i[2]],[i[3]]),[i[4]]))), op(It([i[1]],It([i[2]],It([i[3]],[i[4]])))), op(It(It([i[1]],[i[2]]),It([i[3]],[i[4]])))];

od;

M:=[];

for i in K do

if parse(i)=24 then M:=[op(M), i] fi;

od;

if nops(M)=0 then return `No solutions` else

for i in M do

print(SubString(i,2..length(i)-1));

od; fi; 

end proc:

Two examples:

game24(2,3,8,9);

game24(2,3,3,4);

        No solutions

24.mws

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.

Take a look at this link.

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

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