Introduction to this blog

From time to time, I find some problem with Maple. It is not always Maple's bug, sometimes it is just my mistake.

I am used to use "Submit Software Change Request " form, but I dont know how to trace my requests (and I even dont exactly remember which bugs I posted). Thus, I decided to publish my troubles in this blog.

Unless stated otherwise, all the troubles I specify bellow are obtained on the Mac OS X 10.5 PPC platform using Maple 14.01 ...

I just got a smartphone, amazing. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a mapleprimes app to conveniently view and post messages from a smartphone or a smartpad or whatever? Any plans to set one up? (I'm on the android platform)

The other suggestion/question I have is: any plans (by Maple or others) to make a Maple calculator widget? I'm currently using RealCalc, which is great, but it  doesn't have the advanced term-grouping capabilities of the Maple calculator.

     I suppose that Maple 15 is now in the stage of beta testing, but I have not served as a beta tester for a few years.

     Those scientists and mathematicians who apply Maple in teaching mathematics, science and engineering or who use it in their research naturally wonder what will be in store in the next release to complement and to extend the features in preceding releases. 

     I have no...

Maple uses the LGPL licensed GMP as a support library for doing large integer and high precision float computations. There exists is a later version of GMP than was bundled and shipped in Maple 14.x. A natural question is whether it would improve Maple's performance. Another question is whether it can be used within Maple 14.

Maple 14 - returning after not using Maple since M13...

1. Still can't figure out how to scale images and text. I tried putting an image in a table cell with some text next to it. The only way I can see is to put any images in a space by themselves and not relate them to text. What I see on the screen has little relevance to the printed product, and the only way I have found to scale images correctly is by trial and error. See #6 below for time penalty for changing a table cell size.

2. I don't get to choose the header/footer font size?

3. The footer date format is 12/1/10, which is very nearly the worst it could be, and doesn't respect my Windows settings: 2010.12.01.

4. There is no option to use the file save date rather than the current date.

5. Dragging a corner of an image changes the scaling. IMO, that's what the tabs on the sides and top/bottom are for. Dragging corners should preserve scaling.

6. Changing a cell size in a table means waiting 10 s to get full access to Maple menus and the document (dual 3.4 GHz CPU, 3 GB RAM).

7. I clicked on the Space Shuttle Sim to get an idea of what Maple can do, and then waited 10-15s while Maple played with the palettes and swapped to a new document.

I guess that Maple is about more than this, but I am [relatively] new to it, so I begin where I can...these are usability issues. I understand that Maple has been selling the doc interface for a few releases, but not made much progress.

I guess that I can kiss (no, I'm not upset, just a style of speech) off the document mode and just use the power of Maple to calculate what I need and copy the results in to a word processing program...

[a few hours later] I should say that I found some more comments on the slow interface, and took the hints to close the palettes, which sped things up quite a bit...the penalty is, of course, that I must open them to use them, and that sort of defeats the purpose. Still, if I regard them as drop menus...

There is still the issue of scaling images, and I guess from a quick glance at the included examples that Maple has not figured out how to handle images. I tried to lock the image size, but have not found a way to do so. The quick tutorial on the Maple web site was a great help in getting up to speed quickly.

Mathematica 8 is out and claiming over 500 new features.

Looking through the list they are mostly things that Maple does not do but probably should. Perhaps for Maple 15?...

http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-8/

Just a small issue with how you insert a ^ (caret, wedge, circumflex, arrow, hat, what have you), / (forward slash), or * (star, asterisk) as a literal in a comment in Maple.

In regular code, it works fine;

Typing \_ produces _
Typing \^ produces ^
Typing \/ produces /
Typing \* produces *

In a comment, only underscores work as expected.  The caret, asterisk and slash leave behind the escaping backslash, which you will have to go back and delete yourself.

In previous version  "e" was recognised as the constant.. Now, it is needed to write in special way to get

the digits of "e" ( to use "expression palette")

I really do not know if that is a progress or regression for Maple.

JJ

External calling functions from Windows dlls in Maple uses __stdcall calling convention.

Most Windows dlls including <windows.h> are using that convention (called also WINAPI). However, C runtime dll (msvcrt.dll) and most mathematical dlls - such as gsl, PARI, etc. which would be very useful, are using __cdecl calling convention and functions from them can not be easily called from Maple. One has to create a wrapper dll with __stdcall calling convention for that. In particular, Axel Vogt did that for a part of PARI.

Would that be possible for Maplesoft developers to add option CDECL in define_external in Maple 15 allowing calling C library functions and functions from gsl, PARI, etc. directly from Maple, without a burden of writing __stdcall wrappers for them first?

 Here is a example of a cesaro sum used when a series fails to converge in the usual sense of a sum.

sum((-1)^n*(n^(1/n)-a), n = 1 .. infinity) has a cesaro sum of 1/2*(a+2MRB constant-1).

Proof:

We are given that                            S=  sum((-1)^n*(n^(1/n)-a), n = 1 .. infinity) .

Expanding the infinite series we get         S=(a-1)+(2^(1/2)-a)+(a-3^(1/3))+(4^(1/4)-a)+... .

Collecting the a's and the surds we see that S=a-a+a-a+...+(-1+2^(1/2)-3^(1/3)+4^(1/4)...) .

By Grandi's series  we know that             S=1/2*a+(-1+2^(1/2)-3^(1/3)+4^(1/4)...) .

Collecting the infinite series we get        S=1/2*a+ sum((-1)^n*(n^(1/n)), n = 1 .. infinity).

Which can be shown to be                     S=1/2*a+ sum((-1)^n*(n^(1/n)-1), n = 1 .. infinity)-1/2 .

Thus, by factoring out the 1/2, we get           S=1/2*(a+2 sum((-1)^n*(n^(1/n)-1), n = 1 .. infinity)-1) .

Therefore,                                   S=1/2*(a+2MRB constant-1) .

In order to give symbolic results for that familly of sums Maple shouldmake this identify an integral part of maple in future versions!

Marvin Ray Burns

Original investigator of the MRB constant.

Quite often, when plotting an expression in involving trigonometric functions applied to (a rational polynomial of) the main variable, it is desirable to have the major ticks along the x-axis be labeled by multiples of Pi. In particular, it can be much more appealing to have those tickmarks be labeled with short rationals multiplied by the 2D Math symbol π.

An example of the magic of java. It has an excellent widget toolkit too! Study the beautiful image below for an example of what it can accomplish.

When selecting Plot > Plot Builder > Options the gui hanged like this with no way to restore the program, the x buttons had no effect, and no other input had an effect. I was left to close the process and lose my changes to the .mw file. It's running on XP 64-bit.

It is already September and there has been no updates for the latest Maple release.  Am I to expect that when I purchase the newest copy of Maple that what I buy is what I get and there maybe no updates?  I mean Maple 10 was on the market for a full 2 years with updates, 6 to be exact, so users must have pretty satisfied with the service, hopefully.  And Maple 11 users had their version on the market 3 months longer than Maple 12 although from...

My goal is to make maple better so here I am going to point
out another annoying thing in Maple. If you for example want to have
two plots side by side (I know your question is about two plots in the
same chart but I still think is relevant) in an array then such a array becomes very hard to delete.

A:=Aray(1..2):

A[1]:=plot(....)
A[2]:=plot(...):

display(A);

plot1    plot2


Now the Array A...

restart; interface(version);
  Classic Worksheet Interface, Maple 12.02, Windows, Dec 10 2008 Build ID 377066

B:=binomial(x,k)/binomial(-x,k);

convert(B, GAMMA);
simplify(%);
% assuming x::integer;

                                  0

#but