MaplePrimes Announcement

Mathy If one of our posts showed up in your social media feed recently, you may have found yourself staring at a giant maple leaf with feet and thinking, “Wait… who (or what) is that?” you’re not alone. 

Yes, that big, cheerful leaf you’ve been seeing is very real. 
And yes, they have a name. 

Meet Mathy. 

We officially introduced Mathy to the world a couple of weeks ago at JMM 2026 in Washington, DC, but their story actually started much earlier. 

Mathy was originally created by one of our developers, Marek Krzeminski, a few years ago as a fun internal character. Over time, they quietly became our in-office, local mathscot, popping up as mini 3D-printed Mathys around the office and even as a custom emoji someone created. 

Then, sometime last year, someone had what can only be described as a bold idea: 

What if we brought Mathy to life? 

And just like that, the giant maple leaf went from concept to costume. 

Mathy is fun, curious, and a little playful. That’s very intentional. That’s what math should feel like. 

We believe math matters. We also believe math should be approachable, joyful, and a place where curiosity is rewarded. Mathy reminds us, and hopefully others, that math doesn’t have to be intimidating. It can be fun, and it can inspire awe. 

I’ll be honest. When we decided to bring Mathy to JMM, I was a little nervous. Conferences are busy, serious places. Would people really want to interact with a seven-foot-tall maple leaf? 

As it turns out, yes. Very much yes. 

Researchers (from postdocs to seasoned academics), educators, and undergraduate and graduate students all stopped, smiled, laughed, and asked for photos. At one point, people were actually lining up to take pictures with Mathy.

Let’s just say: Mathy was a hit. 

How tall is Mathy? 
About 7 feet. They are hard to miss. 

What does Mathy love (besides math)? 
Dancing. Very much dancing. 
You can see for yourself here: Mathy's got moves!

Does Mathy talk? 
You bet they do. 

Now that Mathy has officially been introduced to the world, you’ll be seeing them more often on social media, at events, and in a few other fun places we’re cooking up. 

So if you spot a giant maple leaf dancing, waving, or talking math, now you know who they are. 

If you spot Mathy, don’t be shy, say hi. 

 

Featured Post

This post stems from this Question to which the author has never taken the time to give any answer whatsoever.

To help the reader understand what this is all about, I reproduce an abriged version of this question

I have the following data ... [and I want to]  create a cumulative histogram with corresponding polygon employing this same information...

The data the author refers to is a collection of decimal numbers.

The term "histogram" has a very well meaning in Statistics, without entering into technical details, let us say an histogram is an estimator of a Probability Density Function (continuous random variable) or of a mass function (discrete random variable), see for instance Freedman & Diaconis.

The expression "cumulative histogram" is more recent, see for instance Wiki for a quick explanation. Shortly a cumulative histogram can be seen as an approximation of the Cumulative Density Function (CDF) of the random variable whose the sample at hand is drawn from.

In fact there exists an alternative concept named ECDF (Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function) which has been around for a long time and which is already an estimator of the CDF.
Personally I am always surprised, given the many parameters it depends upon (anchors, number of bins, binwidth selection method, ...), when someone wants to draw a cumulative histogram: Why not draw instead the ECDF, a more objective estimator, even simpler to build than the cumulative histogram, and which does not use any parameter (that people often tune to get a pretty image instead of having a reliable estimator)? 

Anyway, I have done a little bit of work arround the OP's question, and it ended in a procedure named Hodgepodge (surely not a very explicit name but I was lacking inspiration) which enables plotting (if asked) several informations in addition to the required cumulative histogram:

  • The histogram of the raw data for the same list of bin bounds.
  • The kernel density estimator of this raw-data-histogram.
  • The ECDF of the data.

Here is an example of data

and here is what procedure Hodgepodge.mw  can display when all the graphics are requested

Featured Post

Many problems in mathematics are easy to define and conceptualize, but take a bit of deeper thinking to actually solve. Check out the Olympiad-style question (from this link) below:

 

Former Maplesoft co-op student Callum Laverance decided to make a document in Maple Learn to de-bunk this innocent-looking problem and used the powerful tools within Maple Learn to show step-by-step how to think of this problem. The first step, I recommend, would be to play around with possible values of a and b for inspiration. See how I did this below:


Based on the snippet above, we might guess that a = 0.5 and b = 1.9. The next step is to think of some equations that may be useful to help us actually solve for these values. Since the square has a side length of 4, we know its area must be 42 = 16. Therefore, the Yellow, Green and Red areas must add exactly to 16. That is,


With a bit of calculus and Maple Learn's context panel, we can integrate the function f(x) = ax2 from x = -2 to x = 2 and set it equal to this value of 8/3. This allows us to solve for the value of a.


We see that a = 1/2. Since the area of the Red section must be three times that of the Yellow (which we determined above to be 8/3), we get Red = (8/3)*3 = 8.

The last step is to find the value of b. In the figure below, we know that the line y = 4 and the curve y = bx2 intersect when bx2 = 4 (i.e. when x = ± 2/sqrt(b)).

 

Since we know the area of the red section is 8 square units, that must be the difference between the entire area underneath the horiztonal line at y = 4 and the curve y = bx2 on the interval [-2/sqrt(b), 2/sqrt(b)]. We can then write the area of the Red section as an integral in terms of b, then solve for the value of b, since we know the Red area is equal to 8.

Voila! Setting a = 1/2 and b = 16/9 ≈ 1.8 guarantees that the ratio of Yellow to Green to Red area within the square is 1:2:3, respectively. Note this is quite close to our original guess of a = 0.5 and b = 1.9. With a bit of algebra and solving a couple of integrals, we were able to solve a mathematics Olympiad problem!



Mathematica plotting code

Maple 2024 asked by masa13 15 February 01