Samir Khan

1839 Reputation

19 Badges

15 years, 160 days

My role is to help customers better exploit our tools. I’ve worked in selling, supporting and marketing maths and simulation software for all my professional career.

I’m fascinated by the full breadth and range of application of Maple. From financial mathematics and engineering to probability and calculus, I’m always impressed by what our users do with our tools.

However much I strenuously deny it, I’m a geek at heart. My first encounter with Maple was as an undergraduate when I used it to symbolically solve the differential equations that described the heat transfer in a series of stirred tanks. My colleagues brute-forced the problem with a numerical solution in Fortran (but they got the marks because that was the point of the course). I’ve since dramatized the process in a worksheet, and never fail to bore people with the story behind it.

I was born, raised and spent my formative years in England’s second city, Birmingham. I graduated with a degree in Chemical Engineering from The University of Nottingham, and after completing a PhD in Fluid Dynamics at Herriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, I started working for Adept Scientific – Maplesoft’s partner in the UK.

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These are Posts that have been published by Samir Khan

We've just launched Maple Flow 2023!

The new release offers many enhancements that help you calculate and write reports faster, resulting in polished technical documents. Let me describe a few of my favorite new features below.

You can now change the units of results inline in the canvas, without taking your hands off the keyboard. You can still use the Context Panel, but the new method is faster and enhances the fluid workflow that Flow exemplifies.

You can also enter a partial unit inline; Flow will automatically insert more units to dimensionally balance the system.

This is useful when results are returned in base dimensions (like time, length and mass) but you want to rescale to higher-level derived units. For an energy analysis, for example, you might guess that the result should contain units of Joules, plus some other units, but you don't know what those other units are; now, you can request that the result contains Joules, and Flow fills the rest in automatically.

The new Variables Palette lists all the user-defined variables and functions known to Flow at the point of the cursor. If you move your grid cursor up or down, the variables palette intelligently removes or adds entries.

You can now import an image by simply dragging it from a file explorer into the canvas.

This is one of those small quality-of-life enhancement that makes Flow a pleasure to use.

You can now quickly align containers to create ordered, uncluttered groups.

We've packed a lot more into the new release - head on over here for a complete rundown. And if you're tempted, you can get a trial here.

We have a lot more in the pipeline - the next 12 months will be very exciting. Let me know what you think!

We've just released Maple Flow 2022.2. The update enhances the user experience in many areas, including user interaction, performance, and the interface.

Performance is a signficant focus.

  • Maple Flow prioritizes the evaluation of the math you see on screen, giving you faster calculation updates for the part of the worksheet you’re working on, with more math being evaluated as you scroll down.
  • We also have more users developing larger documents. Adding white space to large documents, and interacting with sections is now more response and snappier.

In response to many user requests for faster interaction, a new optional evaluation method lets you simply hit equals to evaluate math and display results.

We've also refreshed the in-product Application Gallery with a new look and many new applications (this includes a library of section properties).


 

You can also optionally restrict printing to the left-most column of pages, allowing you to have off-screen supporting calculations not displayed in the final report.

You'll find a complete list of enhhacements here, and you can download the update here.

Mathematical visualizations are beautiful representations of technical phenomena.  From the visual “perfection” of the golden spiral to the pattern generation of fractals, so many works of art can be boiled down to formulas and equations.  Such is the case with N.G. de Bruijn’s medallion and frieze patterns.  Given two starting values, two lines of mathematical formulae produce a recursive sequence of complex numbers.  We can associate these numbers with the four cardinal directions, following the steps on a plot to produce beautiful patterns.  The patterns are of two different types, the closed medallion or repeating frieze, depending on the starting values.

When you need a complex math visualization, Maple is a perfect place to go.  A demonstration of medallion and frieze patterns is available in the Maple Application Center, in which you can vary the starting values and watch the outcome change, along with more detailed background information.  However, there’s an even simpler way to explore this program with the help of Maple Learn.  Maple Learn has the same computational power as Maple, streamlined into an easy-to-use notebook style.  

Maple Learn includes many core features, and anything missing can be ported in through Maple.  This is done using Maple’s DocumentTools:-Canvas package.  The package contains the necessary procedures to convert Maple code into a “canvas”, which can be opened as a Maple Learn sheet.  This makes the whole document look cleaner and allows for easy sharing with friends.

The medallion and frieze document, along with the additional contextual information, is now also available in Maple Learn’s Document Gallery, home to over one thousand example documents covering calculus, geometry, physics, and more.

We've just released Maple Flow 2022.1. We've squeezed in a few new features as requested by our users - I'll describe them below.

Before we get to that, I'd like to give everyone an open invitation to grab a Maple Flow trial - I'd love to know what you think. I'm fanatically devoted to making Flow better, but I can only do that if you give me your feedback.

You can specify if you want your results to be globally displayed using engineering, scientific, or fixed notation

Supporting images can be cut and pasted from another source directly into Maple Flow using standard clipboard operations.

You can now insert a time stamp in headers and footers. And you can optionally place a border around the header, footer or body of the page.

New content in the help system makes it easier to get started with advanced features, including techniques for optimization and signal processing.

Go here to learn more...and don't forget to grab a trial.

 

We’ve just released Maple Flow 2022!

The name of the product – Flow - references a psychological concept known as the flow state. You might know it as being in the zone. That’s when you’re so immersed in your present task that outside distractions melt away, your problem solving skills are firing on all four cylinders, and feel-good neurochemicals flood your brain.

Maple Flow supports a mathematical flow state through a simple design that productively guides the loosely structured and somewhat haphazard way that most people work.

Since Maple Flow's release a year ago, we've regularly added new features through updates, and we're commited to maintaining that momentum. These updates are driven by user feedback, so keep sending your comments and requests my way.

Here’s what we have lined up for you in Flow 2022.

Flow 2022 features a new in-product help system - see it in action here:

In addition to copying & pasting equations and expressions from a help page, you can open entire help pages as worksheets. The nature of Flow means that the help pages have a certain immediacy that becomes very tangible once you start working with them.

You can change the background colour of containers to highlight important results or draw the reader's attention to specific groups of containers.

Prior versions of Flow were a toolbox that needed to be installed on top of Maple.

Now, Flow 2022 is completely standalone, and does not require an existing installation of Maple.This makes managing an installation of Flow far simpler.

A new options menu let you specify how you want worksheet hyperlinks to open – in the same application window, or in a new application window.

We've also made many other quality-of-life changes to Flow. Head on over to the Maple Flow website to learn more or download an evaluation.

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