Released today, with over 4500 additions and enhancements, Maple 16 reinforces our track record for consistent innovation and industry leadership in areas like ease of use and symbolic computing performance.

Over the years Maple has evolved towards a platform for interactive mathematical applications. Countless apps have been developed both by us internally as well as by our user base and shared with both Maple and non-Maple users through deployment tools like MapleNet. Seven years ago we launched the Step by Step Integration Tutor with Maple 10. Release after release we then introduced hundreds of applications, interactive assistants, tutors, and task templates. Starting today you will find over one hundred additional interactive Math Apps in Maple 16, providing insight into concepts from mathematics, physics, science, finance and engineering. 

Ease of use has been a pillar in Maple for many years. A friendly, math-like syntax for expressions and equations, combined with Clickable Math technologies from context-sensitive menus to interactive tutors and assistants, have allowed users around the world to use Maple effectively and become productive very quickly. I am happy to say that Maple 16 is taking this to a new level. Drag-to-Solve™ now allows you to manipulate equations directly: Pick up a term and drag it to the other side of the equal sign to solve problems one step at a time. Even better, Maple will automatically document each step and leave you with a fully-worked solution. Smart Popups in Maple 16 work on highlighted sub-expressions and provide insight and control. Highlight a term and instantly find out whether it can be factored. Highlight a trigonometric expression and get a list of identities that can be applied. Along the way the Smart Popups will always show you the result of the possible operations before you choose which one to apply.

New Clickable Math tools in Maple 16 include Drag-to-Solve and Smart Popups, giving you more
ways to explore and solve your problems.

First and foremost, however, Maple is a mathematical problem solving environment and a major part of the effort for Maple 16 was spent on the computational engine. Performance for many fundamental operations like polynomial multiplication and division improved even further and is miles ahead of the competition.  A new memory manager greatly improves scalability on multi-core machines. Maple is unique in its ability to allow user-level multi-threaded programs and those will now run faster than ever. 

New algorithms for continued fractions, differential geometry, differential equations, interpolation, linear dynamic systems, polynomial system solving,  root finding, statistics and enhancements in many other areas further increases the breadth of applications for Maple 16. Particular attention was also given to algebraic computations in physics, where Maple is now able to represent and compute with more concepts than any other system on the market.

Visualization is an another area of tremendous importance to our users and you will find that plots in Maple 16 look stunning – by default. A lot of work went into optimizing color schemes, gridlines, surface properties and lighting models in order to produce high quality visualizations with no extra effort. A new smart view heuristic automatically adjusts the view to show the most relevant features of 2-D plots  and the rubber band tool allows you to interactively zoom into a region of interest. Data can be visualized quickly and interactively using a dedicated palette. 

 Visualization in Maple 16 has a whole new look, with optimized colour schemes, lighting, and other 
properties to produce high quality visualizations without further adjustments.

The Maple Cloud was introduced two years ago and has turned into a major vehicle for our users to share content. Thousands of Maple documents are being downloaded via the Cloud every single day. To better manage that fast growing content repository, Maple 16 allows for content moderation, “likes”, sorting by popularity as well as a personal “Favorites” view. Personally, I use the Maple Cloud almost every day to store a document then pick it up later from a different computer.

Maple 16 also includes a technology preview to our eBook Publisher. This is the same technology that we use at Maplesoft to create all of our user manuals. You author your material as Maple worksheets and the eBook Publisher automatically produces a full book or technical report, complete with table of contents and index. From a single set of worksheets, you get output as HTML, PDF or EPUB, and because you author in Maple, including mathematical content is straightforward.

I have described some of the highlights of new features in Maple 16. However, this is not the whole story. Maple has a very large and active user community and we listen very carefully to what they (you!) have to say. We are not always able to address all concerns and sometimes it takes a bit of time but you’ll find in Maple 16 that many details throughout the product have changed for the better, in addition to a large list of new features.

Our mission is to make powerful mathematical computations easily accessible and Maple 16 is the next big step along that road. I invite you to come along for the ride and share your experiences with us.

Dr. Laurent Bernardin
Executive Vice-President & Chief Scientist