Maplesoft just announced the upcoming release of Maple 11. This new version of Maple will be publicly available in March of this year.

With this release, Maplesoft is taking everything that was great about Maple 10 and adding to it. Below I will list a few of the features that I am most excited about. If you wish to read the full list of new features please view this page.

The 2-D plotting in Maple 11 has been rewritten from the ground up. You will find that all of the plots coming out of this version are more attractive and much more flexible. The biggest improvement is that you can now include 2-D math in your plots as well as drawing directly onto the plot. You can finally include all math on plots that you can in the worksheet. As an example, you can now have your tickmarks set to a trigonometric scale and have markings ofPi/2,sqrt(x)/y^2,3*Pi/2 and so on.

You can also draw all sorts of shapes and objects onto your plots. So you can include arrows to point out important elements. Trace along your curves, or include descriptive text.

This is a new feature that could be very useful for professors or people giving presentations of Maple worksheets. This is a new view mode that turns every section in a Maple document into a slide. You can show these slides in a full screen mode that works the same as a PowerPoint presentation. And while you are in this mode you can still interact with your worksheet keeping the mathematics live and interactive.

Maple now allows you to choose different formatting modes for your mathematical output. You can just right click on any output and choose to change the Numeric Formatting for that result. This means that you can now have your numbers appear in Engineering, Scientific, Currency, Percentage or Custom formatting. Each formatting mode has a number of options that allow you to have your numbers appear exactly as you would like them to.

Maple now allows you to import data contained in Microsoft Excel files. This adds to the large number of file formats that Maple is able to work with.

Maple 11 has four new Mathematics packages built into it. These include Physics, Differential Geometry, Differential Equations and Graph Theory. As a Computer Science graduate I am most excited about the Graph Theory package. This includes all of the tools that you need to solve most Graph Theory problems. If I had this package during my time in university, my life would have been a lot easier.