Quite often, when plotting an expression in involving trigonometric functions applied to (a rational polynomial of) the main variable, it is desirable to have the major ticks along the x-axis be labeled by multiples of Pi. In particular, it can be much more appealing to have those tickmarks be labeled with short rationals multiplied by the 2D Math symbol π.

Let's compare the performance of two methods of computing the inverse of a large datatype=float[8] Matrix.

The two methods are that of calling `MatrixInverse`,...

If you want better performance then don't use 2D Math mode to enter procedures which call  `.` (dot).

The following timings are not the result of the order in which the cases are performed. The timings stay roughly the same if the blocks delimited by restarts are executed out of order.

I used to have a blog entry which contained an except from an Isaac Asimov story entitled "The Feeling of Power".

I had removed that blog entry, but here is a link to the full text.

I was recently reminded of it by two things. The first was that I was reading a blog entry at Walking Randomly which mentioned Maple 14. And I remembered noticing a page on that site before. And the second was ISSAC 2010.

There are two pieces of extended functionality that I quite often want from the Maple Compiler. The first (task A) is to be able to link in and use an arbitrary function from some other external ("3rd party") shared library, within my Compile'd Maple procedure. The second (task B) is to directly call the compiled Maple procedure from within some computational routine in a 3rd party shared library (which I would then access using define_external). This post is about the first of those, task A.