Well, we've officially joined the web 2.0 revolution :) ... Maplesoft now has a page on Facebook.Come check it out and become a fan!

The Maplesoft office is currently in the process of being burried in snow and many of us are getting ready to head off for the holidays.  Before leaving, I wanted to share this great animated GIF created using 3d plots.  It was sent to me by Bruce Char at Drexel University. The greeting and the Maple script to generate it are after the break.

In my previous post, I was parsing data out of HTML tables so that I could glean some trivia from it.  My true goal was to compile data out of dozens of such tables and so I needed a way to do the whole process in Maple.   So, now, here is how I used Sockets and StringTools to automate the whole process.

Recently there was some discussion in the Maplesoft office about unisex baby names (that is, names that nearly as likely to belong to males as females). Whenever discussing names, I usually head to the US Social Security Administration's wonderful baby names site. They have data on the top 1000 male and female names for children born in the US each year for more than the last century (that includes about 80% of names). They slice the data a little by US state, and popular names for twins and such, but they do not include data on unisex names. So, I applied Maple to the task.

We are happy to announce Maplesoft's latest solution for modeling and simulation is now available!  For those of you who are not familiar with the product, it is a high-performance multi-domain modeling and simulation tool which will revolutionize how you bring products to market.

To learn more about MapleSim follow this link.

Just to clarify, this is not a post to discuss the character played by Cliff Robertson in the movie Gidget....this is much bigger.  This is to announce who the Maple Prime's Mentor of the Year is.  But before I get to that, I would like to thank all members of the Maple Primes community for their contributions over the past year. I hope that you will continue to be active and contribute regularly to Maple Primes.

Every now and then someone will post here on Mapleprimes and the code will use an older package such as linalg or stats. Quite often it is clear that the poster is new to Maple. Yet these packages have been superceded with new ones, eg. LinearAlgebra and Statistics.

One obvious question that then arises is: how did this user decide to use the older package?

Some time ago, I had a blog post about a compendium of inequalities,  Some people took a look and found problems in that paper.  So I took the time to track down the author and point him to the mapleprimes page.

He got back to me some time later, thanking me for pointing out the errors.  But in the same email, he pointed me to 2 other papers, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0707.2098 and http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0707.2584 which contain (interesting?) conjectures which seem amenable to Maple exploration. I meant to look at these myself, but it has now become clear that I won't for quite some time yet. Perhaps these will pique the curiosity of some MaplePrimes member.

Over on the usenet newsgroup comp.math.soft-sys.maple, someone asked about using Maple's overload facility to redefine the operators such as `*`, `+`, etc.

The difficulty for the submitter is that while overload (and option overload for procedures) can provide enhanced operators for new routines, it doesn't affect routines saved in the Maple Library which already have their bindings. Overloading does not subsequently change the bindings of the operators when used in (most all) Library routines.

One way to try and get around this is to actually redefine the global operators. And since overload is on topic, one can still use it in the replacements that one writes.

In order to redefine global operators one must first unprotect them. They are protected for a very good reason. If the replacements are not adequate then Maple can fail in a multitude of ways. It's a case of caveat emptor.

Dear All,

I am writing to invite every MaplePrimes member to join the new Maple Global Network group on LinkedIn, which you can find at this address:

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/846497