I think Maple should emphasize occupational and problem specific packages, like its TA software for teachers. Maple should have a package or set of packages for each type of engineer: electrical,hydrological, etc. Actually, Maple should promote packages for all professions that tend to need it. An abundance of packages would enable many new users to benefit from the power of maple with the experience of the advanced users who helped develop the packages.

See the following PDF for the geometry of the MRB constant.

http://www.marvinrayburns.com/what_is_mrb.pdf

If you have any questions, I would like to hear them.

Marvin Ray Burns

This blog entry marks two milestones:

• I will report on my visit to Maplesoft as the first MaplePrimes Mentor of the Year
  
• I wll earn my 1000th MaplePrimes "point"

 
Scheduling this visit was a challenge. Each semester I limit the number of classes that I miss for professional travel and I have numerous (and increasing) adminstrative responsibilities as the Undergraduate Director for the Department of Mathematics at The University of South Carolina (particularly during the summer months). These constraints, combined with the various travel schedules of Maplesoft's staff necessitated the deferral of this trip until November 2009. (The additional one month delay in preparing this is due to end-of-semester administrative responsibilities.) I wrote the original draft of this from various airports on my way to the 14th Asian Conference on Technology and Mathematics in Beijing, China and, now that Christmas is history, have some time to finish it.

We have recently released updates to four toolboxes. Here are the highlights. More details, and instructions on how to access each one can be found on the Maplesoft downloads page.

MapleSim LabVIEW Connector - now also connected to NI VeriStand. As a result, this product gets a new name. It's now the MapleSim LabVIEW/VeriStand Connector.

MapleSim Control Design Toolbox - improvements have been made to performance, functionality, and examples.

As many of the users on MaplePrimes are instructors, I thought it appropriate to let everyone know about a new resource available on the Maplesoft web site called the Teacher Resource Center.

We’ve just released a new version of the Maplesoft-MAA Placement Test Suite (PTS). PTS 5.0 includes high school prognostic tests from the MAA. The idea is that colleges/universities can offer early feedback to high school students about how they are likely to do on the institution’s math placement tests. With early feedback and time to make changes, students will be better prepared, which means they are less likely to have to take (and pay for!) remedial classes that don’t even count towards their degree.

I just published an update to the script that inserts automatic links to the online help. This fixes several issues with the regular expression used to determine when and where to place the links. So now ?PDEtools[diff_table] ?sum,details and ?implicitplot3d all will be linked correctly.

Here is some statistics from the Cybernet Systems press release.

Overview of Maple

CEO - C. James Cooper
Number of employees - 122
Capital - 2.75 million dollars
Main shareholders - Keith O. Geddes (22%), C. James Cooper (19.8%)

Business results of past 3 years (in US dollars)

The Maple 13.01 update is now available.  It includes:

• 3D visualization: Increased speed and memory efficiency
• Language packs: Improved French translations and expanded support for Greek
• JRE Update: Updated JRE corrects many Java-related issues, and results in improvements in printing on Linux, printing international characters, redrawing components, and plotting
• Other enhancements: Areas of improvement include the performance of plots with a large number of data points, curve colors used in drag-and-drop plotting, the display of mathematics in embedded components, and PDF export.

 As usual, single-user customers will automatically be prompted to update to Maple 13.01 though Maple's automatic "check for updates" mechanism, while network users will be notified by email and directed to the download site. An update CD will be available soon for customers who cannot get the update electronically. More information can be found on the Maple 13.01 download page.

I want to report some progress in finding a closed-form for the MRB constant.