Another pesky student question. Is the speed of light an asymptotic, or limiting value that no other body can perfectly attain ? Does light travel at exactly this value or very very close to it? Would it make sense to try to exactly attain the value of c with something other than EM energy, or would our attempts be similar to taking a limit like in simple calculus ? v/r,

For those interested in financial Math: A classical in mathematical finance is evaluating option prices by binomial trees. This has many advantages (like easy, but coarse results for American options), but it is well known to quite inaccurate for various reasons - even for European options. The 'best' known improvement is due to Leisen-Reimer. They all suffer from low order convergence towards a continuous model. The standard reference model is CCR, the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein tree.

Hi everyone! recently i tried to install maple 10 to my new laptop (runs with windows xp with 2gb ram). The installation went well, just that maple 10 didnt execute at all. It seems that only maplew.exe runs, but not maple.exe (I looked in windows task-manager). Anyone has any ideas?help me please....

I have just read a wonderful paper Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface. The most memorable section subtitle being interactivity considered harmlful. This is a real treasure trove of wonderful design ideas for interfaces for information-rich applications.

I have a polynomial with rather large coefficients: p:=1603710010923073199968*y^23-4364988985594176705252*y^24+422547655969296000+7264153102578558336*y^45+169065700403745582736*y^13-128611747738076673444*y^8-8563613556595259093454*y^28+6789223631529042689902*y^27-2130626240045610796318*y^26+525108809846649600*y+1728547142232628712538*y^18-5445232004984302080*y^2+19613711933501261400*y^4-9838556541278899632*y^3+5707977232657388436*y^6+52290885425808675492*y^5+2632496986338017041292*y^25-171614538652243215240*y^44-1036024897217729030368*y^20-1012602829399487118036*y^40-539338455258111066258*y^42+2773573937520155972892*y^37+520826747617965591864*y^41+2623263653532705732432*y^39-1803335585671962783882*y^38-8590075986982288335146*y^32+611279042420310141816*y^43+4951684899383201226144*y^33-4424947769398292794458*y^34+5954251478749298303256*y^35-3833757485270573904036*y^36-5651683376181765437070*y^30+8111066818063209027372*y^31-635739559009793671968*y^21+401371746662750628814*y^14+85726525982246133894*y^47-236062009670172788728*y^17+1489801241415705188478*y^22+43199536383488301966*y^11+5320957181769399275536*y^29+203205821220894857112*y^10-49909141835427891744*y^46-107459394748809783696*y^7-537835780154113147710*y^12-637675704663881634042*y^16+203782518948443125548*y^9-45370560690351525618*y^15-410373207686338300844*y^19;

I have a question regarding privacy with respect to uploaded files on mapleprimes. It has to deal with where public worksheets are downloaded from. I upload all of my worksheets as public files to ensure the quickest and greatest amount of help to my requests. However, my question is when those public worksheets are downloaded are they actually downloaded from the actual creator's machine (e.g. C: mydocuments...etc), or from somewhere else ? hope that question came across clear. v/r,

To put it simply - it's about the grandkids. As anyone who is a grandparent may understand, once you have grandkids you spend time reflecting back on your own life and no matter where you've been, or what you've done, you always want them to have the opportunity to do better. Having left school at 15 years of age    ( for somewhat noble reasons )   I never learned or had the opportunity to learn the math that I later always wished I had. My life has been so busy raising my family and working the kinds of jobs that many who use Maple will never have to work, that I never had the opportunity to spend the time to further my education.

In Maple 10 today I exported a graph to eps, with the intention of using the LaTeX package psfrag to jazz up the text. I used textplot to place the tags into the eps file as I have done many times in the past--using Maple 9.5, 8, etc. To my horror, in Maple10, the textplot gets placed into the eps file in some hopelessly cryptic way, and psfrag fails to find the tags, and LaTeX replacement of the tags fails. I generated the eps file by right-clicking on the graph, and so I decided to see what happens the other way...click on the graph, select "plot" on the menu, then "export" etc. This worked, almost. I got a simpler type of an eps file, and with this file, LaTeX was able to replace the tags I put in the eps file using textplot. Almost: when I applied the functor dvi2ps, color was lost!

Using Maple 10 on windows XP machine (laptop and desktop). During certain operations/calculations, the screen will flash. This also occurs when opening a maple document that needs to recalculate - the screen flashes repeatedly during the re-calculation. Has anyone else seen this? Regards, Frank

Here is another great comic from XKCD, I hope you like it:

To listen to my own advice, here is a use case: I use 'recent posts' navigation a lot (thanks). Sometimes I read a post to which I want to reply, but I don't have the time to do that right now, but when I do have the time, I have forgotten which post that was. Actually, I can think of 3-4 such posts right now... So I would like to be able to 'mark' a post, so that I can come back to it later. Sure, I could use my browser's bookmarks to do that, but they are already a mess as it is. I think it would make more sense to keep mapleprimes-specific things in/on mapleprimes.

Get this Quaternion Package from Maple's Application Center. Make sure you get the March 2007 version not the March 2005 version.

Overview on Hamilton Quaternions

A Hamilton Quaternion is a hypercomplex number with one real part (the scalar) and three imaginary parts (the vector).

This is an extension of the concept of numbers. We have found that a real number is a one-part number that can be represented on a number line and a complex number is a two-part number that can be represented on a plane. Extending that logic, we have also found that we can produce more numbers by adding more parts.
Quaternion --> a + b*i + c*j + d*k, where the coefficients a, b, c, d are elements of the reals

我呀 今晚我就是天边一颗星了 闪啊闪 被你笑一笑,又看看我自己 恩,多快乐

Recently I was skimming on the Internet for algorithms for alignment of biological sequences (e.g. DNA sequences, protein sequences). The usual purpose of such comparisons is to determine the evolutionary genetic history of two sequences, which in the case of DNA you can think of as strings over the alphabet {A,G,C,T} (the nucleobases). Differences between sequences can arise though substitutions (A → G, G → A, C → T, or T → C), insertions, or deletions. In the last two cases, the resulting string differs in length from the original, and dealing with these size differences is the chief problem that alignment algorithms face. The Needleman-Wunsch algorithm is a very straightforward global sequence alignment algorithm, first proposed in 1970. It's a good example of the applicability of dynamic programming towards biological problems. Following is a Maple implementation based on this Ruby implementation. The algorithm depends on a similarity matrix which measures the "mutational distance" between two nucleobases. It takes two input strings, and returns two strings with dashes ("-") inserted to indicate insertion or deletion events between the sequences.

I am happy to report that MAPLE11 seems to compile whole lot faster than MAPLE10 !