Maple Summer Workshop

They came from Japan, England, Argentina, Hungary, China, the Czech Republic, Australia, Germany, the United States, and Canada. Some came just to learn basic Maple. Others came to share their unique approaches to teaching with Maple. Still others came to learn how to make their Maple packages run faster and cooler. For these and other reasons, over 150 Maple users gathered in Waterloo, Canada from Sunday July 21st to Tuesday the 23rd for the first annual Maple Summer Workshop.

Sunday’s Workshop program serviced all levels of experience in Maple, with an introductory Maple tutorial running in parallel with a technical Q&A session for advanced users. That evening at the welcome reception, participants met the Waterloo Maple team and got a tour of the headquarters.

Participants learned from each other during the contributed sessions on Monday. Thirty experienced Maple users gave presentations at the University of Waterloo on their usage of Maple. To accommodate the gamut of interests at the Workshop, contributed sessions on Maple in education, Maple in mathematics research, and Maple in science, engineering and computing ran in parallel.
Maple co-inventor Dr. Keith Geddes entertained guests at Monday evening’s banquet with tales from Maple’s 20-year history. He recounted how in 1983, a young graduate student named Stephen Watt, the keynote speaker at this year’s Workshop, designed Maple’s first logo in ASCII with the aid of a dot-matrix printer.

On the final day of the Workshop, members of our R&D team led four three-hour computer tutorials on advanced Maple topics. Dr. Laurent Bernardin, head of the Math Group, led a tutorial on advanced Maple programming. Douglas Harder, developer of the Maplets technology, led a tutorial on – surprise! – Maplets.

Professors and their graduate students displayed research results in a poster session in between tutorial sessions. To conclude the Workshop, participants broke into several focus groups to discuss specific issues in an open forum. Waterloo Maple staff moderated the discussions. Topics ranged from numerical algorithms in Maple to support programs for authors of Maple books.

The advertised theme of the Maple Summer Workshop was Learn, Share, Teach. Participants learned new techniques from us and from each other. Of equal value was what we learned from them. We plan to host the Workshop annually to maintain this vital dialogue. Watch for the next Call for Papers in early 2003!

To download the Workshop Proceedings in pdf format, please visit www.maplesoft.com/MSW2002.

Article: Maple Summer Workshop