Just to clarify, this is not a post to discuss the character played by Cliff Robertson in the movie Gidget....this is much bigger.  This is to announce who the Maple Prime's Mentor of the Year is.  But before I get to that, I would like to thank all members of the Maple Primes community for their contributions over the past year. I hope that you will continue to be active and contribute regularly to Maple Primes.

Maple 12.01 is now available. The Maple 12.01 update includes enhancements in a variety of areas, including:

• Differential equations and differential algebraic equations: Numerous enhancements to performance of numerical solvers
• MATLAB link: Extended to include support for MATLAB 2008b
• Language packs: Updates for Spanish, Brazilian-Portuguese, Greek, Japanese, and Chinese
• Plotting:
  • Improved behavior in plot3d when using numpoints and grid options
  • The plots[display] command now handles dual-axis plots inside array plots
• Graph Theory: Context-sensitive menus updated to include more graph theory commands
• Other improvements were made in:
  • Numeric integration
  • Physics package
  • SolveTools package
  • ArrayTools package
  • Debugger

Anyone want to try isprime(2-1) for me?

(see also)

It is not every day that a venerable and wide-ranging standard such as IEEE-754 gets an update!  IEEE 754 dates from 1985 (that was the year it was approved, the actual work started years before).  Wikipedia has a nice summary of the changes.

Of course now inquiring minds want to know: will Maple 13 by IEEE-754-2008 compliant? [For all I know, it might already be most of the way there, with only minor tweaks necessary].

Back to school, back to school, to prove to dad that I'm not a fool...(if you don't know what this is from, google it)

Well now that the school year has started, it's time to get the old grey matter going.  Now if you're a student on this board, there's a good chance that:

a) you know how to use Maple and are helping others out; or

b) you are not familiar with Maple and you want all the help you can get.

I'm assuming there are more people...

This is it… the big one: the nomination period is now open for the Maple Mentor of the Year.  The winner of this prestigious title will receive among other things, a trip to Maplesoft HQ in beautiful Waterloo.  Nominations will be accepted for the month of September, and the recipient will be announced in mid-October.

Does anyone remember (or have) that album?  Anyway, school has started, so summer is officially gone in the eyes of most.  With one more month gone, it’s time for another Mentor Award to be given out.  The recipient of the title Maple Mentor for the month of August, and all the riches and glory that accompany it, is Joe Riel.  Way to go Joe.
 

Keep on posting!

To the members of the MaplePrimes community,

I am posting this message in response to some comments that have been made about Maplesoft’s commitment and involvement in the MaplePrimes community.  Let me assure you that we at Maplesoft take these comments seriously, and I would like to take this opportunity to personally address this issue.

Now that July has come and gone (along with most of the summer), it's time to announce the Maple Mentor Award winner for July.  Congratulations Acer...not only did you win, but you are our first repeat monthly winner!  You know the drill, so let us know what prize you would like.

We are happy to announce the latest product to the Maple line of software.  MapleSim is a high-performance multi-domain modeling and simulation tool which will revolutionize how you bring products to market.

So, after many years in the making, version 1.0 of wine is released.

Can anyone say, whether it'll run Maple 12?

acer

But note the mouse-over caption! See www.xkcd.com for todays (June 11, 2008) strip. This will be printed and posted at the door that seperates the Physics Dept. from the Math Dept. at most institutions.

Tim

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the monthly Maple Mentors Award for May is Dr. Aleksandrs Mihailovs (aka alec).  Dr. Mihailovs will receive a prize of his choice to thank him for his involvement with the MaplePrimes community.

Congratulations...and keep on posting!

It's been a while since I've updated my blog, but the recent Maple 12 release gives me a good opportunity to talk about some of the features I'd been working on for the past months. A few people on MaplePrimes had asked for more details about Maple 12, so I'll start by saying a bit about the new polar axes. A lot of this work was done by my colleagues in the GUI Group and they may have additional interesting things to say about the feature.

In previous versions of Maple, you could draw polar plots using the plots[polarplot] command or with the coords=polar option, but these were always displayed with Cartesian axes. In Maple 12, polar axes are displayed by default, as seen here.

plots[polarplot](1+cos(theta), theta=0..2*Pi, axis[radial]=[tickmarks=5])

 A number of new options were added to the polarplot command so that you can customize the axes.  The most useful ones are the axis[radial] and axis[angular] options. These work like the axis[1], axis[2] and axis[3] options available for general plots, and you can use them to control color, tickmarks and other properties of the radial and angular axes.

Typeset math on plots had been introduced in Maple 11, and now we can take advantage of this with nice axis labels, in multiples of Pi, on the angular axis. These labels appear by default, but of course, they can be customized with the axis options. The plot/typesetting help page provides information on how to add typeset math to plots through the command line. There are also interactive ways to do this, using the context menu.

You can add polar axes to plots created by commands other than plots[polarplot], by using the axiscoordinates=polar option. However, not all the options offered by plots[polarplot] are available generally. Here is an example using plots[implicitplot].

plots[implicitplot]([x^2+2*y^2 = 1, x^2+1.5*y^2 = 1], color = ["Blue", "Green"], x = -1 .. 1, y = -1 .. 1, axiscoordinates = polar);

It is also possible to get the pre-Maple 12 Cartesian axes back with polar plots, by adding the axiscoordinates=cartesian option.