Attached (sim.mpl) is a simple game simulation with data from last years World Series champion Red Sox. Bump up infolevel to see what's going on during a game (as shown below). In the "Maple Baseball" post I wanted to see if the number of runs our team was scoring was appropriate. Obviously, the rule of thumb, 3-hits = 1 run is poor at best. What I really want to find out is if there is a way to improve our scoring chances. The standard baseball batting-order uses the following heuristic:

• lead off with someone with a high on-base percentage (and who can maybe steal a base)
• next 2 are good contact hitters
• batter 4 is your "clean-up" hitter; someone with power
• etc.

As the title states, the pre tag should act like a LaTeX verbatim environment. For those not accustomed to the Joys of TeX, a verbatim environment duplicates the enclosed text. I thought that that was what the pre tag, however, that doesn't appear to be the case. That is, less-than signs (<) in a pre "environment" muck up the html. This makes it quite inconvenient to post snippets of maple code; we have to replace `<' with `&gt;', not particularly convenient. For example,

<pre>
proc()
    if x<y then true fi
end proc:
</pre>

is rendered, more or less, as

It is nice to receive an e-mail message telling me when there is a posting in a thread that I am following in MaplePrimes. When I click on the link in the e-mail, I am taken to a page that reports "Access Denied" (when I am not logged onto MaplePrimes). I do not know what happen if am logged in. There is no indication that the problem is that I am not logged in. I would find it much more informative (and friendly) if the response from the MaplePrimes site was to ask me to log in (showing the login window by default). Assuming successful authentication, I should then be taken to the page with the message.

During my stay in Los Angeles last week, I visited a nephew of mine and noticed that he had solved several of the Sudoku puzzles that appear daily in the LA Times. Not interested in solving a particular problem, I instead thought about how to solve this generally in Maple. Here is a pdf describing my solution and a maple file that implements it. I slightly generalized the problem, allowing any m×m grid.

As I have used MathML to prepare typeset mathematics in maplets, I noticed that there can be some confusion when there is no explicit multiplication operator. The problem appears to be most severe when two numeric quantities appear next to one another, e.g.,

> t := sin( 5*10^x );

I use the following maplet to see how this looks in MathML:

> with(Maplets[Elements]):
> maplet := Maplet([
>    [MathMLViewer('value' = MathML[Export](t))],
>    [Button("OK", Shutdown())]
> ]):
> Maplets[Display](maplet);

I note that the spacing appears to be a little better in Maple 10 than in Maple 9.5. But I would still prefer a centered dot (\cdot in LaTeX) or an x (\times). Note that I am not asking for a multiplication symbol to appear for all products, just ones where it can be difficult to determine the actual terms of the product.

Click the "How do I..." link under "Popular Places" (left side of Maple Primes website). Now click "Experienced Users How do I Forum". This goes to the newbie link, not the experienced users' forum. Also, fix the (varied) misspellings of "Users'". You could just eliminate the apostrophe and few will notice (the link to "forum" is distant and one could argue that the possessive isn't really applicable), but to be precise (I think) go with "Users'".

Thanks for the considered words from Tom, Jim and Trogdor The Burninator, the origins of the name lost in the mists of time?! Tom mentioned several points that I'd like to comment on. The use of extra study books, written at a lower level, is a strategy that I see some local students use. Interstingly though its the more successful student who is using them. The student whom I encounter usually doesn't do this. They have the official text and maybe some printed lecture notes from the internet and thats it. I suspect in this case the problem isn't just the math but the concept of how to study math that is the problem.

f:=sin(t)*x*(1-x);
g:=cos(t)*x*(1-x);
plots[animate](plot,[[f,g],x=0..1],t=0..2*Pi);

This blog entry was created essentially for a possibility to post pictures in comments (where attachments are not allowed.)

OK, in posting a new blog, there is an "Attachment" section... So I could add the three GIFs. They don't show up in the preview, but they did come out when I actually posted...

>	sum((-2)^k, k=1..infinity);

 

 

>	_EnvFormal := true;

 

 

As moderator of the How Do I?? (Newbies) forum, I thought I would post some information for my viewers. As a somewhat "Newbie" to Maple myself, I thought I'd boast about how amazing I think Maple 10 is (and no... this is not just because I work for Maplesoft ;). My first experience using Maple was a year ago, when I started with Maple 9.5. As expected, like any scientific software, there was a learning curve that I had to conquer.

I suppose I'll jump in to the world of the blog with a question: What do you consider to be a solid and accessible introductory textbook to calculus? By Solid I mean: No gaps in coverage that leave the reader at a disadvantage because of unclear text and examples or outright missed topics. By Accessible I mean: Written so the average student can expect to understand the concepts directly or with a small amount of help outside the classroom.

Wen-Xiu Ma recently asked in the maple-assist group,

How to color the following region?
a:=plot([t^2,t^3-1,t=-3..3):
b:=plot([t^3+1,t^2-3,t=-3..3):
c:=plot([t^2+2,t^5-4,t=-3..3):
display([a,b,c],view=[0..5,-3.5..11]);

I just read this article on the Google Blog that talks about a use of Google Maps that they created which shows all of the locations that are using Google Minis to search their websites. Maplesoft has had a Google Mini indexing our websites for several months now, and just recently the search was expanded to include MaplePrimes. So if you can't find something on MaplePrimes using the built in search you can check out the Maplesoft Site Search.

There are some "interesting" functions which I learned about in undergrad: the Weierstrass function is differentiable nowhere, and the 'Christmas-tree' function is continuous at the irrationals and not differentiable at the rationals.