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JacquesC

Prof. Jacques Carette

2401 Reputation

17 Badges

20 years, 76 days
McMaster University
Professor or university staff
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Social Networks and Content at Maplesoft.com

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From a Maple perspective: I first started using it in 1985 (it was Maple 4.0, but I still have a Maple 3.3 manual!). Worked as a Maple tutor in 1987. Joined the company in 1991 as the sole GUI developer and wrote the first Windows version of Maple (for Windows 3.0). Founded the Math group in 1992. Worked remotely from France (still in Math, hosted by the ALGO project) from fall 1993 to summer 1996 where I did my PhD in complex dynamics in Orsay. Soon after I returned to Ontario, I became the Manager of the Math Group, which I grew from 2 people to 12 in 2.5 years. Got "promoted" into project management (for Maple 6, the last of the releases which allowed a lot of backward incompatibilities, aka the last time that design mistakes from the past were allowed to be fixed), and then moved on to an ill-fated web project (it was 1999 after all). After that, worked on coordinating the output from the (many!) research labs Maplesoft then worked with, as well as some Maple design and coding (inert form, the box model for Maplets, some aspects of MathML, context menus, a prototype compiler, and more), as well as some of the initial work on MapleNet. In 2002, an opportunity came up for a faculty position, which I took. After many years of being confronted with Maple weaknesses, I got a number of ideas of how I would go about 'doing better' -- but these ideas required a radical change of architecture, which I could not do within Maplesoft. I have been working on producing a 'better' system ever since.

MaplePrimes Activity


These are Posts that have been published by JacquesC

Interactivity considered harmful...

JacquesC 2401
format interface
April 02 2007
1 4
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.

Bookmarks or a similar mechanism...

JacquesC 2401
March 29 2007
0 2
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.

Chemists leading the way to the Semantic...

JacquesC 2401
March 20 2007
1 2
On the MKM list (Mathematical Knowledge Management), I just read about a very interesting initiative by chemists. A publisher is doing semantic markup of their data. As the poster on the MKM list noted, it is rather sad that it is chemists that are leading here. Mathematicians gave it a half-hearted try (see the mostly defunct OpenMath or the highly-hyped but mostly ignored MathML). But this is probably because semantics of mathematics is so incredibly hard! The efforts in OpenMath and MathML in that direction were really lame, which probably contributed to their uneffectiveness. It is also why the QED Project went nowhere.

Official Maple History...

JacquesC 2401
March 20 2007
0 1
Official History, as written by the authors [later Maplesoft versions were somewhat embelished]. More interesting still is the full list of releases until Maple 9. Actually, that is missing V release 5.1. Counting 5.1, 9.5, 10 and 11, "Maple 11" really ought to be named Maple 26. How many pieces of (commercial!) software have had 26 releases in their lifetime, and still going strong?

BooleanSimplify bug?...

JacquesC 2401
March 15 2007
0 0
The following seems like a bug. Now, it could be that Logic is not built to handle such requests, in which case it should die gracefully, instead of giving funny answers. 
> Logic[BooleanSimplify]((x > 3) &and ¬ (y > 5) &or (y > 5));

                (5 < y) &or ((3 < x) &and ¬(5 < y))
and yet 
> Logic[BooleanSimplify](a &and ¬ b &or b);

                               a &or b
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