JacquesC

Prof. Jacques Carette

2401 Reputation

17 Badges

20 years, 75 days
McMaster University
Professor or university staff
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Social Networks and Content at Maplesoft.com

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

Why are upvotes and downvotes shown separately?  If a question/post is disliked by a lot of people, it should show up as 'negative' (like it does on MathOverflow).  And it should affect people's reputation too!  People who ask sufficiently bad questions (and enough of them) should receive this feedback from the community.  It's what makes the community self-policing!

I suggest that the suggestions for tags that are currently listed be turned off.  This is because they are generally really bad and off-topic (and probably swallow all sorts of CPU time needlessly...).  I much prefer the auto-complete feature in *Overflow for tags (as well as a good list of common ones).

And why does it always suggest to me the tag academic?

The questions do not list 'MaplePrimes' as a possible topic.  And the Post does have (under MaplePrimes Suggestion), as well as talking about "Have a problem with MaplePrimes?" which sure sounds like a question!  So I don't get what the intended difference is.  It made a certain amount of sense in the previous version of Primes, but now that's *Overflow-like, I'm not sure if the distinction makes much sense anymore.

I used to really enjoy reading mapleprimes and answer questions.  It was fun.  There were challenging questions, and some rather interesting design discussions.

And then I got bored.  I am not totally sure exactly why.  In some ways, I think the density of challenging questions went down.  Well, that's perhaps not quite right either -- the density of new (challenging) questions went down.

Try to typeset

normal(1/((omega^Omega/a-1/2)[a,sqrt(2)][1/2]-(zeta+iota)[-y][-1,1]+(xi+Xi)[alpha[1/2]]));

in your favourite version of Maple. What's the "best" way to typeset this in LaTeX so that it looks 'best'? The renderer here on primes gives:-1/(-(omega^Omega/a-1/2)[a,2^(1/2)][1/2]+(zeta+iota)[-y][-1,1]-(xi+Xi)[alpha[1/2]])

It's fairly ugly, but at least the baseline alignments seem to be ok, even though the fonts are way too small (and fuzzy too).

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