My oldest son, Stuart, recently completed a Science Fair project on sudoku puzzles. While I am fairly good at solving sudoku puzzles, the mathematics is something that is completely outside my area of expertise. After seeing the paper by Hurzberg and Murty in the Notices of the AMS (June/July 2007) and additional papers by Felgenhauer and Jarvis (http://www.afjarvis.staff.shef.ac.uk/maths/felgenhauer_jarvis_spec1.pdf)  and Russell and Jarvis (http://www.afjarvis.staff.shef.ac.uk/maths/russell_jarvis_spec2.pdf) and Jarvis' sudoku webpage (http://www.afjarvis.staff.shef.ac.uk/sudoku/), I felt that I had a reasonable understanding of some of the basic ideas involved in counting unique sudoku puzzles. While I had nothing to add to the mathematical ideas, I did see the potential to create a tool to visualize these ideas. The result is the worksheet I just uploaded to MaplePrimes:

View 178_Sudoku3-20-03-08.mw on MapleNet or Download 178_Sudoku3-20-03-08.mw
View file details

A colleague showed this to me earlier this afternoon. I can explain, and accept, most of Maple's responses. I do have one case where I believe Maple could do better.

This arose during the creation of some Maple materials to support the derivation of the Integral Test for series convergence. Consider:

restart;
I1 := Int( 1/x^p, x=1..infinity );
                                /infinity      
                               |          1    
                               |          -- dx
                               |           p   
                              /1          x    

I have been trying to change the signature on the account settings on MaplePrimes. I did make a change in the last couple of weeks, but need to make another change to remove some extraneous characters from the end of the signature. I have gone through the steps to make this change several times (at least 10) in the last couple of days, from work and home. But, the change is never saved. I make the change to the signature, click Submit, and see a message that "The changes have been saved." But, when I try to make another post, the changes have NOT been saved. I have tried entering my password as part of this process, but that makes no difference. I have tried to re-click the Accept box for the Terms and Conditions but this box is inactive.

For the past decade Doug Meade, at the University of South Carolina, has created and maintained a two-page document with essential Maple commands. The first version was created for Maple V, Release 4, in January 1998. n update has been created for each version of Maple (except Maple 10) as it was released. The document has become pretty stable - hence the omission for Maple 10. Here are links to the complete set of documents he has created

• Maple 12 (Nov 2008)
• Maple 11 (Jan 2008)
• Maple 9 (Mar 2004)
• Maple 8 (Oct 2002)
• Maple 7 (Jan 2002)
• Maple 6 (Dec 2000)
• Maple V, Release 5 (Apr 1998)
• Maple V, Release 4 (Jan 1998)

Comments, corrections, and suggestions for improvement are welcomed. Please contact the author by e-mail.

Right now (noon, Friday, 14 December) all 10 items in the Recent Comments are related to one forum, all within the last hour. I think this is the first time I have seen this. While a number of these comments are my own, I think this points out a problem others have made in the past. During active times, many comments get cycled out of Recent Comments before they are seen by regular readers. I would like to see this list given more space. Could it be expanded to keep all comments made in the past 6 hours (or the last 10 comments during slow periods). Maybe Active Forum Topics could be expanded a little, too. It would also be helpful to know how many posts are in a particular discussion and when the last comment was made. This information is available in other parts of MaplePrimes, can it be presented in a more concise form on the main page?