Every year at Maplesoft, we continue to pursue our mission of making powerful computational mathematics easily accessible within a friendly environment. Maple 17 is no exception: Hundreds of new algorithms, from differential equations to statistics to signal processing, continue to keep Maple ahead of the curve. At the same time, a wealth of new innovations within the user interface ensure that you are able to wield that power effectively and with a minimal learning curve.

Looking back over just the past three releases, the amount of research and development that has flown into Maple is staggering, totaling close to 15,000 additions and enhancements to the mathematical engine, user interface and documentation.

Three years ago we introduced the first 50 Math Apps, interactive applications that provide insight and understanding for topics across math and science. The following year we added over a hundred new Math Apps and expanded their scope to include finance and engineering. With Maple 17, we have further expanded the collection of Math Apps, bringing the total to close to 200. We have also made it easier for you to create your own Math Apps. The enhanced Explore command allows for one-step creation of simple Apps, while authoring of more complex ones has become a lot easier with the new code editor (featuring syntax highlighting, auto-indent and more). With the new embedded video component, you can even add videos! Of course, The Möbius Project now also allows easy deployment and even automated grading of Math Apps.

Three years ago we also made it possible to write user-level programs in the Maple language that take advantage of multi-threading and can thus run in parallel on multi-core machines. Maple 17 now also boasts a parallel memory manager which further increases the speed ups that you will see on parallel architectures. Even sequential programs will speed up by an average of 10% due to the new memory manager. Many more performance improvements in Maple 17 ensure that you can tackle more and more complex problems. Sparse vector and matrix operations can be up to one thousand times faster. Common polynomial operations have sped up eight times and automatically take advantage of multiple cores.

Clickable Math, allowing you to formulate problems and get answers without the need for learning a programming language or remembering command names, was introduced almost eight years ago. Since that time, every single release of Maple has continued to evolve this fundamental concept. Last year, two new technologies joined the Clickable Math toolchest: Smart Popups, which can predict what the next steps in a computation might be and provide hints and previews of the resulting computation, and Drag-to-Solve, which allows you to solve an equation simply by picking up a variable and dragging it across the equal sign. In Maple 17, we have continued to expand the scope and power of these unique features.

There is of course a lot more to talk about: new commands for control design and signal processing; tools for automatic grading of essays; new algorithms for equation solving; a new package for group theory and much more.

Maple continues to evolve rapidly and I would like to thank all of you who have contributed to our path by providing feedback and suggestions. Our goal is making you succeed in meeting today’s challenges. Let us know how we can help.