The Revolution and Evolution of Maple 8

The community of Maple users is one of the most fervent and resourceful software user groups in the world. From designing space station robots to diagnosing tumours, our customers continue to apply the Maple product in ways we had never imagined.
We released Maple 8 in May 2002 with one goal in mind: to reward users for their creativity with creative implementations of their most frequently requested features. Some of these, such as Maplets™ and the Calculus1 package, can take users’ applications in revolutionary directions. Others, such as the numeric PDE solver and the interactive plotter, simply continue Maple’s evolution towards greater mathematical power and user-friendliness.

The Revolution
Maplets™
With a new built-in technology called Maplets, you can now create a custom applet-like interface to any Maple application. Inside a maplet window, you can assign Maple commands to buttons, text fields, menus and other familiar UI elements that you choose.

For example, suppose you have written a Maple procedure that computes the paths of two planets under the influence of each other’s gravity. Instead of having users type the procedure name and its parameter values in a worksheet, you could create a maplet that lets them enter the planets’ data in text fields and click a button to call your Maple procedure on the entered values.

A maplet that computes the paths of orbiting planets
For a basic Maplets demo, visit http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O46
To download advanced examples, visit http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O48

New Student Calculus Package
Earlier versions of Maple could always compute limits, derivatives and integrals, but they could only show the final answer. The new Calculus1 package in Maple 8 can actually guide students through the intermediate steps of computing limits, derivatives and integrals. This means that students can now drill themselves on these concepts interactively. At any step of a problem, students can apply a rule of their choice or ask Maple for a hint. For example, Maple might recommend “Substitute u=tan(x)” or “Integrate by parts”.
Diagrams of calculus concepts, such as tangent lines to the graphs of functions and surfaces of revolution, are built into Calculus1 as one-step commands. This relieves teachers of the need to write copious Maple code in order to create visual aids for calculus lectures.
For demos of the Calculus1 package, visit http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O49 and http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O50

The Evolution
New Packages for Mathematicians and Scientists
Maple 8 is not only about revolutionary interfaces and education packages. Maple 8 continues our commitment to supply researchers, scientists and engineers with a continuous stream of new mathematical power.

You could always do higher dimensional calculus computations in Maple, but the new VectorCalculus package simplifies these computations by an order of magnitude. Integrals over complicated 3-D regions, operations, differential geometric measures, and many other computations are now one-line commands. VectorCalculus outputs vectors and vector fields consistently with the notation of standard textbooks and is fully compatible with the Maple LinearAlgebra package.

Visit http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O51 for a demo.

You can now solve PDEs numerically with the new numeric option to pdsolve. Solving classic boundary value problems such as the heat flow through a metal rod now require just a call to pdsolve instead of a worksheet full of Fourier series manipulations.

Visit http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O52 for a demo.

A maplet for the periodic table, based on ScientificConstants
The new ScientificConstants database assures you never again have to consult reference books or the web to perform computations with scientific data. Maple 8 knows Avogadro’s number, the proton magnetic shielding correction, and over 13,000 other scientific constants from physics and chemistry. If the Maple 8 database of constants doesn’t suffice for your application, you can easily extend or change it. In addition to the ScientificConstants demo at http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O54,
check out a maplet for the periodic table at http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O61.

Maple 8 has added Java™ to its repertoire of connectivity with other programming languages. Programmers can exploit the flexibility of Java classes by automatically translating numeric Maple results into Java code. They can also call static Java methods externally from inside Maple 8 applications. For a demo, visit http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O62.

User-Friendlier Worksheets
The flexibility of Maple’s plotting commands can unfortunately make their syntax complicated. In Maple 8, we have given users an alternative to typing long sequences of options inside plot commands. You can now create plots through a built-in maplet that prompts you for all relevant plotting options in text areas and menus.

You no longer have to remember plot option names
We have also included several interface tools that customers have long requested, such as worksheet e-mailing, spell checking and a distinction between the display precision and computation precision of numeric outputs.

For a demo of these and other user-interface enhancements, visit http://www.adeptscience.com/go?pg=O63.

Article: The Revolution and Evolution of Maple 8