On September 4, I wrote a blog post asking for some suggestions regarding what we should do to update MaplePrimes.  The responses that we got back were varied and very valuable.  Using those suggestions as a foundation, we have mapped out a list of features that we will address in this project.

I started six month ago with what I though at the time to be a simple question.

Why is the mean in the Black and Scholes model assumed to be (mu-(1/2)*sigma^2)*T ?

I had seen numerous attempts of deriving such an relationship on the Internet but every solution that I found always had some flaw in the step-by-step mathematical logic which meant that the solution was rendered useless.

Sometime in 1992 I was offered the title of “Applications Engineer” at Maplesoft. I was the company’s very first employee to hold this title and it was my first real job.  I was thrilled! Imagine, if you will, an impoverished student who had been living on the most pitiful of incomes for almost ten years, all of a sudden being offered a great salary and the chance to travel and meet interesting people around the world! And for the most part, all I had to do was show people how great this thing called Maple was.

A few years ago I wrote a tool, mgrep, for searching Maple repositories;  download mgrep.zip. The zip file includes the noweb source (mgrep.nw), however, it is missing some of the files needed to rebuild the documentation—I will add them later when I bring an old drive back online.  You should not, however, need to rebuild the documentation (mgrep.pdf) because it is included along with the shell-script (mgrep) and gawk file (mgrep.awk).  To use the tool you will need to install mgrep and mgrep.awk in a directory in your path.  The --help option prints a brief help page.

Here I use mgrep to partially explore a question that  acer poses, that, whether % may be usefully employed in a Maple procedure. A reasonable start is to see whether it is so used in the distributed Maple library.  First I go to the lib subdirectory of the Maple installation, then call mgrep to search maple.mla for all procedures that use % as a name

Happy New Year!

Alec

I find the zooming in on a plot rather cumbersome.  First you zoom and the plot tends to wander then you have to select the pan and zoom again. 

I would find it much better if you could make a box on the plot to zoom to.  Similar to one of AutoCAD's zooming options. 

Seems there's a little tweaking needed for the plot when parameters are left are out for two plots or more.  Maple doesn't take the plot far enough in some cases. 

For example:

plot([(1000^x),(x!)]);         With this format Maple doesn't, but should, include both plots.  It gets 'stuck' as it were on the x-axis going only to 10

however adding parameters fixes the issue, but I shouldn't have to do this. 

plot([(1000^x),(x!)],x=0..35,y=0..1e30);

Could there be a useful performance gain if Maple were changed so that %, %%, and %%% did not function inside a procedure (proc) body?

Should one ever use % in a procedure? Would using it just be obfuscation where none is needed, or could it serve a special purpose?

While on this topic, how good or bad would it be to use a Standard GUI equation label inside the body of a proc that was entered in 2D Math?

acer

This book is an excellent read for anyone interested in statistical analysis or mathematics at work in the real world. 

Maybe the next time you decide to open your own business you could use a few of the studies mentioned in this book and put them to use in your own store.  It's quite interesting.  

I have been running Maple 11 under Fedora 9 Linux without problem.

With expression palette for multivariable calculus in Maple entering multivariable calculations wll be very easy such as double and triple integrals, line and surface integrals. No other program such as Mathematica or Matlab have this, why Maple don't be first who has this option.

Sorry for my english it's not my mother language.

Best wishes

Aleksandar, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia

Maple doesn't seem to have a trace plot feature after you've created a plot.  The coordinate readout only roughly estimates the points.  Graphically I should be able to get exact points on a plotted line or curve as I move my cursor?  This feature has to be added as a new feature in future versions.

Also I just noticed animated graphs do not have the coordinate feature. 

eval is having 2 arguments, so how to apply it to expression sequences?

eval(x=1,x=2,x=y);
Error, invalid input: 
    eval expects 1 or 2 arguments, but received 3

The usual approach is to convert an expression sequence to a list, apply eval, and then either use op, or [] at the end to convert it back to an expression sentence. Something like

eval([x=1,x=2],x=y)[];

                             y = 1, y = 2

or use quotting,

Computers with multiple processors have been around for a long time and people have been studying parallel programming techniques for just as along. However only in the last few years have multi-core processors and parallel programming become truly mainstream. What changed?

Here are some definitions for terms used in this post:

• core: the part of a processor responsible for executing a single series of instructions at a time.
• processor: the physical chip that plugs into a motherboard. A computer can have multiple processors, and each processor can have multiple cores
• process: a running instance of a program. A process's memory is usually protected from access by other processes.
• thread: a running instance of a process's code. A single process can have multiple threads, and multiple threads can be executing at the same on multiple cores
• parallel: the ability to utilize more than one processor at a time to solve problems more quickly, usually by being multi-threaded.

For years, processors designers had been able to increase the performance of processors by increasing their clock speeds. However a few years ago they ran into a few serious problems. RAM access speeds were not able to keep up with the increased speed of processors, causing processors to waste clock cycles waiting for data. The speed at which electrons can flow through wires is limited, leading to delays within the chip itself. Finally, increasing a processor's clock speed also increases its power requirements. Increased power requirements leads to the processor generating more heat (which is why overclockers come up with such ridiculous cooling solutions). All of these issues meant that is was getting harder and harder to continue to increase clock speeds.  The designers realized that instead of increasing the core's clock speed, they could keep the clock speed fairly constant, but put more cores on the chip. Thus was born the multi-core revolution.