With the winter solstice speeding towards us, we thought we’d create some winter themed documents. Now that they’re here, it’s time to show you all! You’ll see two new puzzle documents in this post, along with three informative documents, so keep reading.

Let’s start with the tromino tree!

First, what’s a tromino? A tromino is a shape made from three equal sized squares, connected to the next along one full edge. In this puzzle, your goal is to take the trominos, and try to fill the Christmas tree shape.

There’s a smaller and larger tree shape, for different difficulties. Try and see how many ways you can fill the trees!

Next, we’ll look at our merry modulo color by numbers.

In this puzzle, your goal is to solve the modulo problems in each square, and then fill in the square with the color that corresponds to the answer. Have fun solving the puzzle and seeing what the image is in the end!

Snowballs are a quintessential part of any winter season, and we’ve got two documents featuring them.

The first document uses a snowball rolling down a hill to illustrate a problem using differential equations. Disclaimer: The model is not intended to be realistic and is simplified for ease of illustration. This document features a unique visualization you shouldn’t miss!

Our second document featuring snowballs talks about finding the area of a 2-dimensional snowman! Using the formula for the area of a circle and a scale factor, the document walks through finding the area in a clear manner, with a cute snowman illustration to match!

The final document in this mini-series looks at Koch snowflakes, a type of fractal. This document walks you through the steps to create an iteration of the Koch snowflake and contains an interactive diagram to check your drawings with!

I hope you’ve enjoyed taking a look at our winter documents! Please let us know if there’s any other documents you’d like to see featured or created.

Welcome back to another Maple Learn blog post! Today we’re going to talk about the gift-wrapping algorithm, used to find the convex hull of a set of points. If you’re not sure what that means yet, don’t worry! We’re going to go through it with four Maple Learn documents; two which are background information on the topic, one that is a visualization for the gift-wrapping algorithm, and another that goes through the steps. Each will be under their own heading, so feel free to skip ahead to your skill level!

Before we can get into the gift-wrapping algorithm we need to define a few terms. Let’s start by defining polygons and simple polygons.

Polygon: A closed shape created by joining a series of line segments.

Simple polygon: A polygon without holes and that does not intersect itself.

So, what are convex and concave polygons? Well, there are three criteria that define a convex polygon. A polygon that is not convex is called concave. The criteria are…

1. Any line segment connecting any two points within the polygon stays within the polygon.
2. Any line intersects a polygon’s boundary at most twice.
3. All interior angles are less than 180 degrees or pi radians.

Because the criteria are equivalent, if any one is missing, the shape is concave. AKA, all three criteria must be present for a shape to be convex. Most “regular shapes”, such as trapezoids, are convex polygons!

A shape that satisfies convex criteria but not the criteria for being a polygon is called a convex set.

As mentioned at the start of this post, the gift-wrapping algorithm is used to find the convex hull of a set of points. Now that we know what convex polygons and convex sets are, we can define the convex hull!

Convex hull: The convex set of a shape or several shapes that fully contains the object and has the smallest possible area.

Why was the convex polygon important? Well, the convex hull of a set of points is always a convex polygon. Some of the points in the set are the vertices of said polygon, and are called extreme points. You can find the convex hull of either concave or convex polygons.

This document amazed me when I tried it for the first time. Here, you can generate a set of points with the “Generate Another” button, and then press the “Visualize” button. The document then calculates the perimeter of the convex hull of the set of points! The set can be further customized below the buttons, by changing the number of points. The other option below it allows you to slow down or speed up the visualization. Pretty cool, huh? It’s like it’s thinking!

Try the document out a few times, or watch the gif below to get a quick idea of it.

This final document walks you through the steps of how to use the gift wrapping algorithm. It is a simple loop of 4 steps, with one set-up step. Unlike the other documents in this post, I won’t be delving too far into the math behind the steps. I want to encourage you to check this one out yourself, as it’s really quite a fun problem to solve once you have some time!

I hope you check out the documents in this post. Please let us know below if there’s any other documents you’d like to see featured!

Have you ever heard of the Maurer Rose?

The Maurer Rose was demonstrated in 1987 by Peter Maurer and is created by connecting certain points on a rose curve. This creates petal-like patterns, caused by the oscillation of a sine curve.

So, how are these created? A "rose curve" is created in polar coordinates with the equation sin(nt) for a (positive integer) value of n.  To create the Maurer Rose, straight line segments are drawn connecting points on the curve at incrementing angle values.  The size of this increment (called d in our examples) leads to different patterns of lines across the curve.

This can be done in Maple Learn! One example of the Maurer Rose already exists, complete with a full interactive visualization and a more detailed overview of the Maurer Rose.

Play around with it and look below at some of the different shapes that can be created using this document! The first is created with an n value of 31 and a d value of 65, with blue and red. The second uses an n value of 4 and a d value of 133, and purple and green.

Are there any other concepts you’d like to see represented in Maple Learn’s document gallery? Please let us know in the comments below!

Have you heard of Maple Scripting before? Do you want to extend your Maple Learn documents with your Maple knowledge? Scripting is the process of using Maple to create Maple Learn documents. If you’re already used to Maple, this may be a piece of cake for you, but we wanted to start from the basics for anyone who wants to extend their Maple Learn and Maple knowledge. This process can be used for many different types of documents, from quizzes to intensive 3D visualizations.

So, let’s get started! All Maple Learn document scripting needs the DocumentTools:-Canvas package. The canvas, as you know, is that white space in a Maple Learn document. Therefore, this package is the core content of a scripted document! Always put:

with(DocumentTools:-Canvas):

At the top of your code, or put

uses DocumentTools:-Canvas:

At the start of your procedures.

Now that we’ve told Maple to use the DocumentTools:-Canvas, we need to create a canvas.

Canvases are created as variables, using the command NewCanvas. Inside NewCanvas, you will add a square-bracket list of all the content you want to see inside. For now, just know that you can add text cells with Text(“YOUR TEXT”) and a math cell with Math(YOUR MATH). On the next line, make sure to put either ShareCanvas(YOUR CANVAS VARIABLE) or ShowCanvas(YOUR CANVAS VARIABLE).  ShareCanvas creates a Maple Learn sharelink, while ShowCanvas shows the canvas directly in Maple. Note that ShowCanvas does not have every Maple Learn feature, but makes quick work of fast error checking.

canvas := NewCanvas([Text(“My first canvas”), Math(3*x+2*y)]):

ShareCanvas(canvas);

There are two more things I want to show you in this post: How to make a group have multiple cells (instead of just the one), and how to position your items on the canvas. Let’s start with group making.

To create a group with multiple cells, use the Group() command within the NewCanvas command, and separate the cells with commas, in a list. You don’t need to specify Text() or Math() when using Group().

canvas := NewCanvas([Group([“This is the first cell…”, “The second….”, “and the third.”])]):

At the end of any command/canvas element, within the brackets, you can define position=[x,y] to specify where on the canvas the object should go. You can adjust the precision pixel by pixel until you are happy with the layout.

When we put all these together, we get code that looks like this:

with(DocumentTools:-Canvas):

canvas := NewCanvas([

Group(["This is the first cell…", "The second…", "and the third."], position=[200,200]),

Math(3*x+2, position=[100,100]),

Text("This is text!", position=[400,400])]):

ShareCanvas(canvas);

And in the end, your scripted document looks like this.

We hope this helps you get started with Maple Scripting. There will be another post on even more of what we can do with Maple Scripting, and how we can make these documents even more interactive. Let us know if there’s anything specific you want to see in that post!

Welcome back to another Maplesoft blog post! Today, we’re looking at how math appears in nature. Many people know that there’s math within the mysteries of nature, but don’t know exactly what’s going on. Today we’ll talk about some of the examples but remember that there’s always more.

Let’s start with a well-known example: The Fibonacci sequence! This is a recursive sequence, made by adding the previous two terms together to make the next term. The Fibonacci sequence starts with 0, then 1. So, when modelling this sequence, you get “0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,” and so on.

Now, where can this sequence be seen? Well, the sequence forms a spiral. This spiral can be seen in fingerprints:

Image: Andrea Greengard/Mindful Living Network

Eggs:

Image: Andrea Greengard/Mindful Living Network

And, in some cases, spiral galaxies. For more examples of the Fibonacci sequence, check out a blog on examples of the Fibonacci Sequence by Andrea Greengard!

Image: Andrea Greengard/Mindful Living Network

Another interesting intergalactic math fact is that celestial bodies are typically spherical, such as stars and planets. As well, orbits tend towards spherical, often being ellipses. It’s fascinating to see how many spheres there are in nature!

Moving away from spirals in nature, another example of math in nature, although there are many more, is the Hardy-Weinburg Equilibrium.  When in Hardy-Weinburg Equilibrium, a population’s allele and genotype frequencies, in the absence of certain evolutionary factors, stay constant through generations. The Hardy-Weinburg Equilibrium is used to predict genotypes from phenotypes of certain populations, as one example. Come check out our documents on this topic for more details, both on the Hardy-Weinburg Equilibrium and some practice examples.

Image: Maplesoft

In the end, math is incredibly ingrained in nature. We can use mathematical formulas and patterns to predict how plants will grow, or population genetics, and much more! Please let us know if there’s any examples you’d like to see in more depth, and we can see if writing a blog post on it is possible, or even a Maple Learn document for the gallery!