Update - April 4, 2011: I corrected a typo in Table 2, first column, bottom row.  What was sqrt(6) has been changed to sqrt(5).

Since coming to Maplesoft in 2003, I've kept a notebook of "gems" I've gleaned from consulting with the programmers in the building. I call it my "Little Red Book of Maple Magic." It really is red. The first spiral-bound notebook was little, and it was red. When it overflowed, I moved the notes to a red ring-binder. But it's not so little any more.

I have always preferred the notation  for the derivative of

I spent this past week preparing a Webex presentation to a client who was interested in using Maple for a physics course in chaos. Of the two texts selected for the course, I had one on my own bookshelf. So I scanned Steven Strogatz' text Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos (Addison Wesley, 1994) for topics that would profit from investigation with Maple.

The hardest and/or most important part of answering a question is making sure the real question is understood. The July 1, 2010 question Using fsolve with a dispersion relation posted to MaplePrimes seemed to be about obtaining a numeric solution of an equation. Turns out it was more a question about the behavior of an implicit function.