## 2005 Year of Gauss

by:
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Karl Friedrich Gauss, one of the most important mathematicians of all time. To mark this occasion, the Georg-August-Universität, the town of Göttingen and the Göttingen Gauss Association have declared 2005 Gaussjahr (Gauss year). I stumbled onto this interesting bit of news as I did some research on the city of Göttingen, Germany. A colleague of mine suggested this city as a candidate entry for Singular Planet. Göttingen is not only famous for Gauss but also for Hilbert, Heisenberg , and 44 Nobel laureates.

Is is possible to add comments in Maple code without gyrating through the LanguageDefinition? Below is a sample that shows an embedded comment - it would be nice if this were possible.
fn := proc(n)
local x;

# here's my math
x := n + n;

end proc;

C(fn);

int fn(int n)
{

// here's my math
x = n + n;

return x;
}


## Singular Planet

by:
A collaborative travel guide for the mathematical tourist: A passion for math, science, and technology is a common denominator for most of us in the Primes community. We are also global in scope with representation from all corners of our planet. In addition, many of us have vocations that take us to other lands or welcome like-minded visitors from far away places.

## Wiki ... what and how ...

by:
The topic of Wiki has popped up in several postings including in response to my question In the "How do we grow this site?". I think we're generally agreed that this would be a good thing to do. My real question is what and how are we going to do this.

## Testing robustness

by: Maple
So you have a Maple accessible through the web (like on this site). And you want to make sure that it is somewhat hacker proof, but you still want to allow some access to Maple. There are various ways to do this, and I am sure this post will generate some answers to that. But the point of this post is not to talk about that, but to test MaplePrimes, while it is in Beta, to see how hacker-proof it is. So let's test it (first is the input in <code> and then the same in <maple>):
ssystem("tail /etc/passwd") ssystem("tail /etc/passwd") 3+2 3+2 ssystem("ls") ssystem("ls")

## Bragan's Brainstorm

by: Maple

Attached (sim.mpl) is a simple game simulation with data from last years World Series champion Red Sox. Bump up infolevel to see what's going on during a game (as shown below). In the "Maple Baseball" post I wanted to see if the number of runs our team was scoring was appropriate. Obviously, the rule of thumb, 3-hits = 1 run is poor at best. What I really want to find out is if there is a way to improve our scoring chances. The standard baseball batting-order uses the following heuristic:

• lead off with someone with a high on-base percentage (and who can maybe steal a base)
• next 2 are good contact hitters
• batter 4 is your "clean-up" hitter; someone with power
• etc.

## Solving a Sudoku Puzzle with Maple

by:
During my stay in Los Angeles last week, I visited a nephew of mine and noticed that he had solved several of the Sudoku puzzles that appear daily in the LA Times. Not interested in solving a particular problem, I instead thought about how to solve this generally in Maple. Here is a pdf describing my solution and a maple file that implements it. I slightly generalized the problem, allowing any m×m grid.

## MathML display of numeric products and limits

by:
As I have used MathML to prepare typeset mathematics in maplets, I noticed that there can be some confusion when there is no explicit multiplication operator. The problem appears to be most severe when two numeric quantities appear next to one another, e.g.,
> t := sin( 5*10^x );

I use the following maplet to see how this looks in MathML:
> with(Maplets[Elements]):
> maplet := Maplet([
>    [MathMLViewer('value' = MathML[Export](t))],
>    [Button("OK", Shutdown())]
> ]):
> Maplets[Display](maplet);

I note that the spacing appears to be a little better in Maple 10 than in Maple 9.5. But I would still prefer a centered dot (\cdot in LaTeX) or an x (\times). Note that I am not asking for a multiplication symbol to appear for all products, just ones where it can be difficult to determine the actual terms of the product.

## Continuing the Textbook Discussion

by:
Thanks for the considered words from Tom, Jim and Trogdor The Burninator, the origins of the name lost in the mists of time?! Tom mentioned several points that I'd like to comment on. The use of extra study books, written at a lower level, is a strategy that I see some local students use. Interstingly though its the more successful student who is using them. The student whom I encounter usually doesn't do this. They have the official text and maybe some printed lecture notes from the internet and thats it. I suspect in this case the problem isn't just the math but the concept of how to study math that is the problem.

## Cool math stuff

by:
Through Bill Page's post "Crazy Ideas", I was lead to a shopping site with the largest selection of math and other assorted "geek ware" I've ever encountered. The place is called CafePress and it's a general supplier of stuff to the student crowd. For those of you who want to declare your passion for all things mathematical, binary, or multi-threaded ...

## Welcome to the Maple Commons

Welcome! This forum is for talking about anything that has to do with Maple and mathematics. The moderator for this forum is Stephen Forrest.

## What happened to the other MaplePrimes?

by:
MaplePrimes was the name that was used for our exclusive access site for our Extended Maintenance Program (EMP) sites. Maplesoft has launched a new program for maintenance – the Elite Maintenance Program. The EMP program will soon be launching a new website within maplesoft.com that will replace the old MaplePrimes, but also will bring more benefits. The name MaplePrimes is now used for Maplesoft's band new user community. The new MaplePrimes will help to serve more Maple users. It allows all users, including those who are not EMP customers to interact together and get even more out of their use of Maple. MaplePrimes is a web community dedicated to sharing experiences, techniques, and opinions about Maple and related products, as well as general interest topics in math and computing. Using the framework of blogs, forums, and an open editorial policy, it provides a vehicle for enthusiasts to present their thoughts, and for inquiring minds to get answers.

## Posting 2D Math on MaplePrimes

by:

There are two ways of directly entering math into MaplePrimes. The first is the <maple> tag. Any text between <maple></maple> tags will be interpreted as Maple syntax and be replaced with a 2D GIF image of that syntax.

## Suggestions for profile information

by:
We're now getting into the final points. One thing that I envisioned for this site is some way for individuals to showcase themselves and if they wanted to share certain identifying and possibly fun information. Currently that section looks extremely corporate and wreaks of someone wanting spam targets.

My suggestions are,

1) remove telephone numbers all together
2) keep addresses as knowing what country, city, organization etc.
3) My job is, (choose one only):
- technical professional in industry or government
- professor or university staff
Well, I've been working on a units poster for some time now... Okay, so this isn't the same as some of the blogs which are currently posted, but c'est la vie. I recall thinking how close g (= 9.80665) was to π, and only now do I learn that that is more than coincidence. When the French came up with the metre, I guess they wanted something very close to three Parisian feet, and there were at least two possibilities: 1/10 000 000 the distance from the North Pole to the Equator or the length of a pendulum which has a half period of 1 s. As it turned out, they picked the former, but as both were close appropximations to the same standard, it ended up that ≈(sqrt(g/m), pi/s), and thus, solving for g, we get that ≈(g, pi^2).