After more than 25 years of leading research in areas such as differential equations, special functions, and computational physics, Edgardo's role with Maplesoft will shift at the end of 2024 as he returns to academic research. At Maplesoft, he will transition into the position of Research Fellow Emeritus. In this role, Edgardo will remain engaged with many of his cherished projects, though he will not have as much time to maintain the intense level of activity that characterized his work for so many years.

Many of you know Edgardo personally or have interacted with him here or on the Maple Beta Forum. I hope you'll join me in wishing him the very best as he begins this new chapter.

I was working in my living room.  My computer was upstairs, but I had my phone and tablet.  I'm working on The Book ("Perturbation methods using backward error", with Nic Fillion, which will be published by SIAM next year some time).

I've discovered something quite cool, historically, about the WKB method and George Green's original invention of the idea (that bears other people's names, or, well, initials, anyway).  (As usual.)  Green had written down a PDE modelling waves in a long narrow canal of slowly varying breadth 2*beta(x) and slowly varying depth 2*gamma(x).  Turns out his "approximate" solution is actually an exact solution to an equation of a very similar kind, with an extra term E(x)*phi(x,t).  The extra term depends in a funny way on beta(x) and gamma(x), and only on those.  So a natural kind of question is, "is there a canal shape for which Green's solution is the exact solution with E(x)==0?"  Can we find beta(x) and gamma(x) for which this works?

Yes.  Lots of cases.  In particular, if the breadth beta(x) is constant, you can write down a differential equation for gamma(x).  I wrote it in my notebook using y and not gamma.  I wrote it pretty neatly.  Then I fired up the Maple Calculator on my little tablet, opened the camera, and pow!  Solved.

I wrote the solution down underneath the equation.  It checks out, too.  See the attached image.

Now, after the fact, I figured out how to solve it myself (using Ricatti's trick: put y' = v, then y'' = v*dv/dy, and the resulting first order equation is separable).  But that whole "take a picture of the equation and write down the solution" thing is pretty impressive.

So: kudos to the designers and implementers of the Maple Calculator.  Three cheers!