My Maple 14 usage varies, but largely because Maple continues to eat up memory. My documents (I usually use doc mode and 2D math) are typically in the 20MB range, but over a period of several hours as I work with them, memory usage grows to ~200MB. I have just begun to include gc() in my documents, but don't know how it will affect memory use. I find it curious that I can load and run a doc, have it consume ~10MB, do a restart, and run the whole doc again, to find that an additional 10MB of memory is used. ??? I've left the Task Manager (Win XP Pro SP3, 4GB RAM) up and watched memory use for Maple climb slowly but steadily, even while I am not doing anything.

There are many similar products in the marketplace today, and each of them has its strengths and weaknesses. In my personal experiences, I see, and am involved with, 3 of the possible markets for strong math tools: education, research, and engineering. Not surprisingly, each of these overlaps the others. I am a strong advocate for introducing a spectrum of math tools to undergraduates, beginning with their first week of classes. It is only through such broad exposure that students will acquire the ability to reach for the best tool for the job, and come to realize what power these tools bring to the table to enrich their education and help them explore how mathematics relates to their studies. I don't think that any one product today embodies the best of class in this area.

I first started using Maple with version 12, and found that it did not meet my expectations. Maple is unquestionably a very powerful math tool, and is used very effectively by researchers and engineers alike. But I found the many different modes of entry confusing {1D, 2D, document, worksheet} - that is to say, they have a steep learning curve and are not well documented - and put it aside for some time. I revisited Maple with version 13, and found that little had changed from my point of view, though doubtless there was progress in other areas that I was too inexperienced to use. I have now upgraded to Maple 14, and I find that little has changed from 12 & 13 with regard to my attempts to use the product. Below you will see in the attachment a presentation from another product. The math is trivial; it is an attempt to create an educational moment for students, and accompany classroom discussion. It benefits from being a live document, clean in presentation, and using a symbolic presentation that parallels the mathematical presentation. Maple does not do this particular presentation well, as far as I can determine. Yet this does not mean that Maple is a poor product, for it has many other features that the competing product does not have, and its other support for students is the strongest and most comprehensive that I have seen in the market.

Legendre_polynomial_.pdf

The problem faced by students is the learning curve of each of these powerful, but complex, products. Product Help should be a strong asset, as should community sharing tools such as this forum, but in both cases reality falls far short of the capability of each aid.

It is interesting to read all the comments here and on other sites regarding the future of math tools. I have often been an early adopter of different technologies, gambling that the products I was adopting would find a niche and grow. In most instances, I have been fortunate to not have been disappointed. But I find that the atmosphere is changing on two fronts. On the one hand, gambling on new technologies is seen as risky, rather than innovative, behavior. Given the steep investment of time and money in evaluating new tools for a particular enterprise, that is not surprising, even if it is not wholly productive, either. On the other hand, companies producing products such as Maple, Mathcad, and COMSOL, once so responsive to their user base, have lost, it seems, much of their connection with the user community. Hence we see folks questioning where the product that they have invested in so heavily is headed, and wondering whether the time that they continue to invest will pay off 5-10 years in the future.

Most of us don't really know what goes on behind closed doors in any of these companies. The founders of the companies that created Maple, Mathcad,and MATLAB had visions of what they might bring to the marketplace, and often (it seems to me) were more interested in what they could accomplish than in becoming financial giants. Companies are usually driven by an economic need to survive and grow, however, and in this regard the environment has changed. I suspect that Maplesoft may well have become a bit bloated and inefficient; that seems to be the plight of those companies that are not constantly keenly aware of their mission and what it takes to accomplish that mission. I am beginning to invest in the Maple product line, and I'd like to think that investment won't be wasted. The truth is that I have little control over the course of the company, and even the comments that I make on this forum may well have little impact. We went to the moon - and almost didn't make it; we came back from the moon - and almost didn't make it. Some of us feel comfortable with risky behavior; most do not. I sympathize with those who wonder about the future of products such as Maple. I am confident that such products are a vital part of our educational, scientific, and engineering future, but how well they progress, and which ones survive, remains to be seen. These days, investing emotionally in any one product is a recipe for feeling frustrated and insecure. Would that it were not so, but the way companies behave these days does not engender a sense of security. The Maple development folks have some serious work cut out for them if they intend to present a well-polished product in the near future. I hope that they meet the challenge.

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I installed the OrthogonalExpansions files in the lib directory per the readme.txt file. Apparently Maple found the library, but putting the cursor on EnvLegendreCut (l-click) or highlighting, then pressing F2 gets me a "Not Found" error message.

Update: I put the cursor on LegendreSeries and pressed F2. That brought up Help for LegendreSeries, which referenced EnvLegendreCu. Oddly, all it says is that this variable must be assigned (1, infinity), so I wonder why it is not simply assigned in the library (I know virtually nothing about libraries; this is my first excursion into that area.).

I have run several tests and my system is consistently slow running this code. I have an

Intel 2 CPU T7400 @2.16GHz w 4GB 1GHz RAM, Win XP Pro SP3

Maple 14.01, IBM INTEL NT, Oct 15 2010, Build ID 53595

Other packages don't seem to have a speed issue.

I installed the OrthogonalExpansions files in the lib directory per the readme.txt file. Apparently Maple found the library, but putting the cursor on EnvLegendreCut (l-click) or highlighting, then pressing F2 gets me a "Not Found" error message.

Update: I put the cursor on LegendreSeries and pressed F2. That brought up Help for LegendreSeries, which referenced EnvLegendreCu. Oddly, all it says is that this variable must be assigned (1, infinity), so I wonder why it is not simply assigned in the library (I know virtually nothing about libraries; this is my first excursion into that area.).

I have run several tests and my system is consistently slow running this code. I have an

Intel 2 CPU T7400 @2.16GHz w 4GB 1GHz RAM, Win XP Pro SP3

Maple 14.01, IBM INTEL NT, Oct 15 2010, Build ID 53595

Other packages don't seem to have a speed issue.

I checked that out, and it seems that style affects only some text associated w plots. I haven't tried to see what all it affects.

I checked that out, and it seems that style affects only some text associated w plots. I haven't tried to see what all it affects.

Thanks for both those tips. I am just picking up Maple and MaplePrimes. I used one of them. I noticed as I was bworsing this page that there a More drop down upper right, and it has the Software Change Request link, too.

Thanks for both those tips. I am just picking up Maple and MaplePrimes. I used one of them. I noticed as I was bworsing this page that there a More drop down upper right, and it has the Software Change Request link, too.

I should prolly say that I have used Maple very little over the past few years, and am pretty much a novice.

I have not tried plotsetup(), though I will now look into it. It seems that axiswidth and height are not available to be defined in the GUI? So, for example, I cannot r-click on the plot and set these values? I tried, and could not find them.

It looks as if plotsetup will only address a sepecific plot. Will it apply to the plot as it is printed as part of a document?

I should prolly say that I have used Maple very little over the past few years, and am pretty much a novice.

I have not tried plotsetup(), though I will now look into it. It seems that axiswidth and height are not available to be defined in the GUI? So, for example, I cannot r-click on the plot and set these values? I tried, and could not find them.

It looks as if plotsetup will only address a sepecific plot. Will it apply to the plot as it is printed as part of a document?

In fact, the article has received over 130 citations...it dates from 1994, but I seem to recall doing such calculations on programmable calculators in the 1970s! Of course, we don't have the actual text of the article, so it may contain something novel. The sheer number of citations, in the absence of anything other than the abstract, is what worries //this// diabetic. Are these the folks who are supposed to be improving my quality of life?

 Thanks to all of you for great replies and suggestions.

This is great news. Thanks for the response. I wonder if the installations are order-independent. For example, I just had to rebuild my hard drive, and I installed M13. I'd like to install M12. Should I uninstall M13 first and then install it last?

 Thanks for that tip, Patrick! I visited the link briefly. I'll go back sometime this weekend, but I can see that it will take some time to read thoroughly and work through some examples...

 Thanks for that tip, Patrick! I visited the link briefly. I'll go back sometime this weekend, but I can see that it will take some time to read thoroughly and work through some examples...