Submit your paper or extended abstract to the Maple Conference!

The papers and extended abstracts presented at the 2019 Maple Conference will be published in the Communications in Computer and Information Science Series from Springer. 

The deadline to submit is May 27, 2019. 

This conference is an amazing opportunity to contribute to the development of technology in academics. I hope that you, or your colleagues and associates, will consider making a contribution.

We welcome topics that fall into the following broad categories:

• Maple in Education
• Algorithms and Software
• Applications of Maple

You can learn more about the conference or submit your paper or abstract here: 

https://www.maplesoft.com/mapleconference/Papers-and-Presentations.aspx

Download QCT2019_PrimesV17_05.05.19.mw

In this Post I derive the differential equations of motion of a homogeneous elliptic lamina of mass m and the major and minor axes of lengths of a and b which rolls without slipping along the horizontal x axis within the vertical xy plane.

If the initial angular velocity is large enough, the ellipse will roll forever and go to ±∞ in the x direction, otherwise it will just rock.

I have attached two files:

 rolling-ellipse.mw
        Worksheet to solve the differential equations and animate the motion

rolling-ellipse.pdf
         Documentation containing the derivation of the differential equations

And here are two animations extracted from the worksheet.

I am a highschool teacher and we just started using Maple. It is a great program, but the students  had a few problems with the worksheet-mode in the editor. Here is a list of small problems that are hopefully easy to fix.

In text editors such as Word you can highlight a piece of text and select "insert->equation" to turn the text into an equation. Maple doesn't supprt this, so if the students have written an equation in textmode, then they have trouble turning it into math-mode. (the answer is: highlight, ctrl-X, F5, ctrl-v but that is difficult to guess for beginners)

Once in a while the students place two equations next to eachother with no space in between. When this happens they cannot place the cursor between the two eqations, and therefore they cannot place a newline between the equations. In other words the two equations are glued together. (I think that you can solve this by pressing f5 in the right place, but it would be better to mirror the behavior of word)

It would be great to allow the user to delete the pink error messages by pressing delete. Sometimes the students use math mode to write text inside a large paragraph and the result is an error message a few lines below. This error message cannot be deleted unless you trace down the math field and delete it. In one situation a student had deleted all the letters in the math field, but the error message could not be deleted until the empty mathfield had been found and deleted. (One solution is to highlight all math fields on the page whenever the user is editing text in math mode. That would make them easier to find and understand)

If a student pressed enter or alt-enter inside an equation in worksheet mode, then the student stays in worksheet mode after executing the equation. I would prefer to switch to text-mode after pressing enter. This would mirror the behavior of word. Sometimes the students end up writing a long paragraph because they expect Maple to mirror the behavior of word. Once the text has been written in math mode then it is difficult to convert it into textmode again (This requires highlight, ctrl-X, F5, ctrl-v)

It would be great to write an equation that isn't meant to be executed by the kernel.  In other words the equation should only be for display. You can solve this by writing ":"  at theb end of the equation, but that makes the math look weird. It would be nice to have a way to do this.

If mac users havent installed a printer then they cannot export to pdf. It would be great to solve this problem (or at least write a helpful error message)

All of these problems are beginner problems, but if I you want to sell Maple in highschools then I think that you can gain from focusing on making Maple approachable so that the students have an early succes-story with the program. In my class we switched to Maple from another math program, and it was a hard sell because the other math program had an easier editor.

While googling around for Season 8 spoilers, I found data sets that can be used to create a character interaction network for the books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, and the TV show they inspired, Game of Thrones.

The data sets are the work of Dr Andrew Beveridge, an associate professor at Macalaster College (check out his Network of Thrones blog).

You can create an undirected, weighted graph using this data and Maple's GraphTheory package.

Then, you can ask yourself really pressing questions like

• Who is the most influential person in Westeros? How has their influence changed over each season (or indeed, book)?
• How are Eddard Stark and Randyll Tarly connected?
• What do eigenvectors have to do with the battle for the Iron Throne, anyway?

These two applications (one for the TV show, and another for the novels) have the answers, and more.

• Game of Thrones and Graph Theory
• A Song of Ice and Fire and Graph Theory

The graphs for the books tend to be more interesting than those for the TV show, simply because of the far broader range of characters and the intricacy of the interweaving plot lines.

Let’s look at some of the results.

This a small section of the character interaction network for the first book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (this is the entire visualization - it's big, simply because of the shear number of characters)

The graph was generated by GraphTheory:-DrawGraph (with method = spring, which models the graph as a system of protons repelling each other, connected by springs).

The highlighted vertices are the most influential characters, as determined by their Eigenvector centrality (more on this later).

The importance of a vertex can be described by its centrality, of which there are several variants.

Eigenvector centrality, for example, is the dominant eigenvector of the adjacency matrix, and uses the number and importance of neighboring vertices to quantify influence.

This plot shows the 15 most influential characters in Season 7 of the TV show Game of Thrones. Jon Snow is the clear leader.

Here’s how the Eigenvector centrality of several characters change over the books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.

A clique is a group of vertices that are all connected to every other vertex in the group. Here’s the largest clique in Season 7 of the TV show.

Game of Thrones has certainly motivated me to learn more about graph theory (yes, seriously, it has). It's such a wide, open field with many interesting real-world applications.

Enjoy tinkering!

I recently had a wonderful and valuable opportunity to meet with some primary school students and teachers at Holbaek by Skole in Denmark to discuss the use of technology in the classroom. The Danish education system has long been an advocate of using technology and digital learning solutions to augment learning for its students. One of the technology solutions they are using is Maple, Maplesoft’s comprehensive mathematics software tool designed to meet the unique and complex needs of STEM courses. It is rare to find Maple being used at the primary school level, so it was fascinating to see first-hand how Maple is being incorporated at the school.

In speaking with some of the students, I asked them what their education was like before Maple was incorporated into their course. They told me that before they had access to Maple, the teacher would put an example problem on the whiteboard and they would have to take notes and work through the solution in their notebooks. They definitely prefer the way the course is taught using Maple. They love the fact that they have a tool that let them work through the solution and provide context to the answer, as opposed to just giving them the solution. It forces them to think about how to solve the problem. The students expressed to me that Maple has transformed their learning and they cannot imagine going back to taking lectures using a whiteboard and notebook.

Here, I am speaking with some students about how they have adapted Maple to meet their needs ... and about football. Their team had just won 12-1.

Mathematics courses, and on a broader level, STEM courses, deal with a lot of complex materials and can be incredibly challenging. If we are able to start laying the groundwork for competency and understanding at a younger age, students will be better positioned for not only higher education, but their careers as well. This creates the potential for stronger ideas and greater innovation, which has far-reaching benefits for society as a whole.

Jesper Estrup and Gitte Christiansen, two passionate primary school teachers, were responsible for introducing Maple at Holbaek by Skole. It was a pleasure to meet with them and discuss their vision for improving mathematics education at the school. They wanted to provide their students experience with a technology tool so they would be better equipped to handle learning in the future. With the use of Maple, the students achieved the highest grades in their school system. As a result of this success, Jesper and Gitte decided to develop primary school level content for a learning package to further enhance the way their students learn and understand mathematics, and to benefit other institutions seeking to do the same. Their efforts resulted in the development of Maple-Skole, a new educational tool, based on Maple, that supports mathematics teaching for primary schools in Denmark.

Maplesoft has a long-standing relationship with the Danish education system. Maple is already used in high schools throughout Denmark, supported by the Maple Gym package. This package is an add-on to Maple that contains a number of routines to make working with Maple more convenient within various topics. These routines are made available to students and teachers with a single command that simplifies learning. Maple-Skole is the next step in the country’s vision of utilizing technology tools to enhance learning for its students. And having the opportunity to work with one tool all the way through their schooling will provide even greater benefit to students.

(L-R) Henrik and Carolyn from Maplesoft meeting with Jesper and Gitte from Holbaek by Skole

It helps foster greater knowledge and competency in primary school students by developing a passion for mathematics early on. This is a big step and one that we hope will revolutionize mathematics education in the country. It is exciting to see both the great potential for the Maple-Skole package and the fact that young students are already embracing Maple in such a positive way.

For us at Maplesoft, this exciting new package provides a great opportunity to not only improve upon our relationships with educational institutions in Denmark, but also to be a part of something significant, enhancing the way students learn mathematics. We strongly believe in the benefits of Maple-Skole, which is why it will be offered to schools at no charge until July 2020. I truly believe this new tool has the potential to revolutionize mathematics education at a young age, which will make them better prepared as they move forward in their education.

Hi

The Physics Updates for Maple 2019 (current v.331 or higher) is already available for installation via MapleCloud. This version contains further improvements to the Maple 2019 capabilities for solving PDE & BC as well as to the tensor simplifier. To install these Updates,

• Open Maple,
• Click the MapleCloud icon in the upper-right corner to open the MapleCloud toolbar 
• In the MapleCloud toolbar, open Packages
• Find the Physics Updates package and click the install button, it is the last one under Actions
• To check for new versions of Physics Updates, click the MapleCloud icon. If the Updates icon has a red dot, click it to install the new version

Note that the first time you install the Updates in Maple 2019 you need to install them from Packages, even if in your copy of Maple 2018 you had already installed these Updates.

Also, at this moment you cannot use the MapleCloud to install the Physics Updates for Maple 2018. So, to install the last version of the Updates for Maple 2018, open Maple 2018 and enter PackageTools:-Install("5137472255164416", version = 329, overwrite)

Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab
Physics, Differential Equations and Mathematical Functions, Maplesoft

This application solves a set of compatible equations of two variables. It also graphs the intersection point of the variable "x" and "y". If we want to observe the intersection point closer we will use the zoom button that is activated when manipulating the graph. If we want to change the variable ("x" and "y") we enter the code of the button that solves and graphs. In spanish.

System_of_Equations_Determined_Compatible_2x2_and_3x3.mw

Lenin Araujo Castillo

Ambassador of Maple

Maple users often want to write a derivative evaluated at a point using Leibniz notation, as a matter of presentation, with appropriate variables and coordinates. For instance:

Now, Maple uses the D operator for evaluating derivatives at a point, but this can be a little clunky:

p := D[1,2,2,3](f)(a,b,c);

q := convert( p, Diff );

u := D[1,2,2,3](f)(5,10,15);

v := convert( u, Diff );

How can we tell Maple, programmatically, to print this in a nicer way? We amended the print command (see below) to do this. For example:

print( D[1,2,2,3](f)(a,b,c), [x,y,z] );

print( D[1,2,2,3](f)(5,10,15), [x,y,z] );

print( 'D(sin)(Pi/6)', theta );

Here's the definition of the custom version of print:

# Type to check if an expression is a derivative using 'D', e.g. D(f)(a) and D[1,2](f)(a,b).

TypeTools:-AddType(   

        'Dexpr',      

        proc( f )     

               if op( [0,0], f ) <> D and op( [0,0,0], f ) <> D then

                       return false;

               end if;       

               if not type( op( [0,1], f ), 'name' ) or not type( { op( f ) }, 'set(algebraic)' ) then

                       return false;

               end if;       

               if op( [0,0,0], f ) = D and not type( { op( [0,0,..], f ) }, 'set(posint)' ) then

                       return false;

               end if;       

               return true;          

        end proc      

):


# Create a local version of 'print', which will print expressions like D[1,2](f)(a,b) in a custom way,

# but otherwise print in the usual fashion.

local print := proc()


        local A, B, f, g, L, X, Y, Z;


        # Check that a valid expression involving 'D' is passed, along with a variable name or list of variable names.

        if ( _npassed < 2 ) or ( not _passed[1] :: 'Dexpr' ) or ( not passed[2] :: 'Or'('name','list'('name')) ) then

               return :-print( _passed );

        end if;


        # Extract important variables from the input.

        g := _passed[1]; # expression

        X := _passed[2]; # variable name(s)

        f := op( [0,1], g ); # function name in expression

        A := op( g ); # point(s) of evaluation


        # Check that the number of variables is the same as the number of evaluation points.

        if nops( X ) <> nops( [A] ) then

               return :-print( _passed );

        end if;


        # The differential operator.

        L := op( [0,0], g );


        # Find the variable (univariate) or indices (multivariate) for the derivative(s).

        B := `if`( L = D, X, [ op( L ) ] );


        # Variable name(s) as expression sequence.

        Y := op( X );


        # Check that the point(s) of evaluation is/are distinct from the variable name(s).

        if numelems( {Y} intersect {A} ) > 0 then

               return :-print( _passed );

        end if;


        # Find the expression sequence of the variable names.

        Z := `if`( L = D, X, X[B] );

       

        return print( Eval( Diff( f(Y), Z ), (Y) = (A) ) );


end proc:

Do you use Leibniz Notation often? Or do you have an alternate method? We’d love to hear from you!

Last year, I read a fascinating paper that presented evidence of an exoplanet, inferred through the “wobble” (or radial velocity) of the star it orbits, HD 3651. A periodogram of the radial velocity revealed the orbital period of the exoplanet – about 62.2 days.

I found the experimental data and attempted to reproduce the periodogram. However, the data was irregularly sampled, as is most astronomical data. This meant I couldn’t use the standard Fourier-based tools from the signal processing package.

I started hunting for the techniques used in the spectral analysis of irregularly sampled data, and found that the Lomb Scargle approach was often used for astronomical data. I threw together some simple prototype code and successfully reproduced the periodogram in the paper.

After some (not so) gentle prodding, Erik Postma’s team wrote their own, far faster and far more robust, implementation.

This new functionality makes its debut in Maple 2019 (and the final worksheet is here.)

From a simple germ of an idea, to a finished, robust, fully documented product that we can put in front of our users – that, for me, is incredibly satisfying.

That’s a minor story about a niche I’m interested in, but these stories are repeated time and time again.  Ideas spring from users and from those that work at Maplesoft. They’re filtered to a manageable set that we can work on. Some projects reach completion in under a year, while other, more ambitious, projects take longer.

The result is software developed by passionate people invested in their work, and used by passionate people in universities, industry and at home.

We always pack a lot into each release. Maple 2019 contains improvements for the most commonly used Maple functions that nearly everyone uses – such as solve, simplify and int – as well features that target specific groups (such as those that share my interest in signal processing!)

I’d like to to highlight a few new of the new features that I find particularly impressive, or have just caught my eye because they’re cool.

Of course, this is only a small selection of the shiny new stuff – everything is described in detail on the Maplesoft website.

Edgardo, research fellow at Maplesoft, recently sent me a recent independent comparison of Maple’s PDE solver versus those in Mathematica (in case you’re not aware, he’s the senior developer for that function). He was excited – this test suite demonstrated that Maple was far ahead of its closest competitor, both in the number of PDEs solved, and the time taken to return those solutions.

He’s spent another release cycle working on pdsolve – it’s now more powerful than before. Here’s a PDE that Maple now successfully solves.

Maplesoft tracks visits to our online help pages - simplify is well-inside the top-ten most visited pages. It’s one of those core functions that nearly everyone uses.

For this release, R&D has made many improvements to simplify. For example, Maple 2019 better simplifies expressions that contain powers, exponentials and trig functions.

Everyone who touches Maple uses the same programming language. You could be an engineer that’s batch processing some data, or a mathematical researcher prototyping a new algorithm – everyone codes in the same language.

Maple now supports C-style increment, decrement, and assignment operators, giving you more concise code.

We’ve made a number of improvements to the interface, including a redesigned start page. My favorite is the display of large data structures (or rtables).

You now see the header (that is, the top-left) of the data structure.

For an audio file, you see useful information about its contents.

I enjoy creating new and different types of visualizations using Maple's sandbox of flexible plots and plotting primitives.

Here’s a new feature that I’ll use regularly: given a name (and optionally a modifier), polygonbyname draws a variety of shapes.

In other breaking news, I now know what a Reuleaux hexagon looks like.

Since I can’t resist talking about another signal processing feature, FindPeakPoints locates the local peaks or valleys of a 1D data set. Several options let you filter out spurious peaks or valleys

I’ve used this new function to find the fundamental frequencies and harmonics of a violin note from its periodogram.

Speaking of passionate developers who are devoted to their work, Edgardo has written a new e-book that teaches you how to use tensor computations using Physics. You get this e-book when you install Maple 2019.

The new LeastTrimmedSquares command fits data to an equation while not being signficantly influenced by outliers.

In this example, we:

• Artifically generate a noisy data set with a few outliers, but with the underlying trend Y =5 X + 50
• Fit straight lines using CurveFitting:-LeastSquares and Statistics:-LeastTrimmedSquares

LeastTrimmedSquares function correctly predicts the underlying trend.

We try to make every release faster and more efficient. We sometimes target key changes in the core infrastructure that benefit all users (such as the parallel garbage collector in Maple 17). Other times, we focus on specific functions.

For this release, I’m particularly impressed by this improved benchmark for factor, in which we’re factoring a sparse multivariate polynomial.

On my laptop, Maple 2018 takes 4.2 seconds to compute and consumes 0.92 GiB of memory.

Maple 2019 takes a mere 0.27 seconds, and only needs 45 MiB of memory!

I’m a visualization nut, and I always get a vicarious thrill when I see a shiny new plot, or a well-presented application.

I was immediately drawn to this new Maple 2019 app – it illustrates the transition between day and night on a world map. You can even change the projection used to generate the map. Shiny!

So that’s my pick of the top new features in Maple 2019. Everyone here at Maplesoft would love to hear your comments!

It is my pleasure to announce the return of the Maple Conference! On October 15-17^th, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, we will gather a group of Maple enthusiasts, product experts, and customers, to explore and celebrate the different aspects of Maple.

Specifically, this conference will be dedicated to exploring Maple’s impact on education, new symbolic computation algorithms and techniques, and the wide range of Maple applications. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about the latest research, share experiences, and interact with Maple developers.

In preparation for the conference we are welcoming paper and extended abstract submissions. We are looking for presentations which fall into the broad categories of “Maple in Education”, “Algorithms and Software”, and “Applications of Maple” (a more extensive list of topics can be found here).

You can learn more about the event, plus find our call-for-papers and abstracts, here: https://www.maplesoft.com/mapleconference/

There have been several posts, over the years, related to visual cues about the values associated with particular 2D contours in a plot.

Some people ask or post about color-bars [1]. Some people ask or post about inlined labelling of the curves [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. And some post about mouse popup/hover-over functionality [1]., which got added as general new 2D plot annotation functionality in Maple 2017 and is available for the plots:-contourplot command via its contourlabels option.

Another possibility consists of a legend for 2D contour plots, with distinct entries for each contour value. That is not currently available from the plots:-contourplot command as documented. This post is about obtaining such a legend.

Aside from the method used below, a similar effect may be possible (possibly with a little effort) using contour-plotting approaches based on individual plots:-implicitplot calls for each contour level. Eg. using Kitonum's procedure, or an undocumented, alternate internal driver for plots:-contourplot.

Since I like the functionality provided by the contourlabels option I thought that I'd highjack that (and the _HOVERCONTENT plotting substructure that plot-annotations now generate) and get a relatively convenient way to get a color-key via the 2D plotting legend.  This is not supposed to be super-efficient.

Here below are some examples. I hope that it illustrates some useful functionality that could be added to the contourplot command. It can also be used to get a color-key for use with densityplot.

Download contour_legend_post.mw

Download Tensors_-_A_Complete_Guide.mw, or the pdf version with sections open: Tensors_-_A_Complete_Guide.pdf

Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab
Physics, Differential Equations and Mathematical Functions, Maplesoft

Recently, my research team at the University of Waterloo was approached by Mark Ideson, the skip for the Canadian Paralympic men’s curling team, about developing a curling end-effector, a device to give wheelchair curlers greater control over their shots. A gold medalist and multi-medal winner at the Paralympics, Mark has a passion to see wheelchair curling performance improve and entrusted us to assist him in this objective. We previously worked with Mark and his team on a research project to model the wheelchair curling shot and help optimize their performance on the ice. The end-effector project was the next step in our partnership.

The use of technology in the sports world is increasing rapidly, allowing us to better understand athletic performance. We are able to gather new types of data that, when coupled with advanced engineering tools, allow us to perform more in-depth analysis of the human body as it pertains to specific movements and tasks. As a result, we can refine motions and improve equipment to help athletes maximize their abilities and performance. As a professor of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, I have overseen several studies on the motor function of Paralympic athletes. My team focuses on modelling the interactions between athletes and their equipment to maximize athletic performance, and we rely heavily on Maple and MapleSim in our research and project development.

The end-effector project was led by my UW students Borna Ghannadi and Conor Jansen. The objective was to design a device that attaches to the end of the curler’s stick and provides greater command over the stone by pulling it back prior to release.  Our team modeled the end effector in Maple and built an initial prototype, which has undergone several trials and adjustments since then. The device is now on its 7^th iteration, which we felt appropriate to name the Mark 7, in recognition of Mark’s inspiration for the project. The device has been a challenge, but we have steadily made improvements with Mark’s input and it is close to being a finished product.

Currently, wheelchair curlers use a device that keeps the stone static before it’s thrown. Having the ability to pull back on the stone and break the friction prior to release will provide great benefit to the curlers. As a curler, if you can only push forward and the ice conditions aren’t perfect, you’re throwing at a different speed every time. If you can pull the stone back and then go forward, you’ve broken that friction and your shot is far more repeatable. This should make the game much more interesting.

For our team, the objective was to design a mechanism that not only allowed curlers to pull back on the stone, but also had a release option with no triggers on the curler’s hand. The device we developed screws on to the end of the curler’s stick, and is designed to rest firmly on the curling handle. Once the curler selects their shot, they can position the stone accordingly, slide the stone backward and then forward, and watch the device gently separate from the stone.

For our research, the increased speed and accuracy of MapleSim’s multibody dynamic simulations, made possible by the underlying symbolic modelling engine, Maple, allowed us to spend more time on system design and optimization. MapleSim combines principles of mechanics with linear graph theory to produce unified representations of the system topology and modelling coordinates. The system equations are automatically generated symbolically, which enables us to view and share the equations prior to a numerical solution of the highly-optimized simulation code.

The Mark 7 is an invention that could have significant ramifications in the curling world. Shooting accuracy across wheelchair curling is currently around 60-62%, and if new technology like the Mark 7 is adopted, that number could grow to 70 or 75%. Improved accuracy will make the game more enjoyable and competitive. Having the ability to pull back on the stone prior to release will eliminate some instability for the curlers, which can help level the playing field for everyone involved. Given the work we have been doing with Mark’s team on performance improvements, it was extremely satisfying for us to see them win the bronze medal in South Korea. We hope that our research and partnership with the team can produce gold medals in the years to come.

Throughout the course of a year, Maple users create wildly varying applications on all sorts of subjects. To mark the end of 2018, I thought I’d share some of the 2018 submissions to the Maple Application Center that I personally found particularly interesting.

Solving the 15-puzzle, by Curtis Bright. You know those puzzles where you have to move the pieces around inside a square to put them in order, and there’s only one free space to move into?  I’m not good at those puzzles, but it turns out Maple can help. This is one of collection of new, varied applications using Maple’s SAT solvers (if you want to solve the world’s hardest Sudoku, Maple’s SAT solvers can help with that, too).

Romeo y Julieta: Un clasico de las historias de amor... y de las ecuaciones diferenciales [Romeo and Juliet: A classic story of love..and differential equations], by Ranferi Gutierrez. This one made me laugh (and even more so once I put some of it in google translate, which is more than enough to let you appreciate the application even if you don’t speak Spanish). What’s not to like about modeling a high drama love story using DEs?

Prediction of malignant/benign of breast mass with DNN classifier, by Sophie Tan. Machine learning can save lives.

Hybrid Image of a Cat and a Dog, by Samir Khan. Signal processing can be more fun that I realized. This is one of those crazy optical illusions where the picture changes depending on how far away you are.

Beyond the 8 Queens Problem, by Yury Zavarovsky. In true mathematical fashion, why have 8 queens when you can have n?  (If you are interested in this problem, you can also see a different solution that uses SAT solvers.)

Gödel's Universe, by Frank Wang.  Can’t say I understood much of it, but it involves Gödel, Einstein, and Hawking, so I don’t need to understand it to find it interesting.