Here is another great comic from XKCD, I hope you like it:

Well hello. My name is Phoenix:) I have recently started going to school for computers, information systems, and found out you need to be good at math to work with computers. Now don't laugh....but math didn't cross my mind when I signed on, and I am horrible with math :( I am 24 years old and am still learning my multiplication tables. That was one subject I just never could find any help with as a child, and now as an adult I am afraid I am clueless when it comes to anything mathmatical. I am taking the course online, so I do not really have anyone next to me in class to help if I get confused.

Just came across and interesting blog post on language design, focusing on the architecture versus features dimension. Trying to place Maple on this, it pretty much has to co-exist with Perl in the Pragmatic column. For comparisons' sake, one would have to place Mathematica in the Consistent column. The arrow of time graph is quite interesting. Maple is firmly a 'mature platform'. Whether it is 'bloated' is a very subjective call at this point; people of a more minimalist bent would certainly say so, but compared to something like Perl or C++, it most definitely is not. However, it is rather inevitable that it will become bloated: Maplesoft needs to push out new versions for people to upgrade to, and to be able to sell those, 'new' features have to be there to warrant an upgrade, right?

Is our world could be exist in the complex space? We already know that our living space are in 3-D. But if the space we live is actually in the complex one, then that means we are living in the 6-D sapce. Maybe it is hard to say what the dimension of our space really are. One thing for sure is there always some mysteries waitting to be answered. Quantum mechanics is one big mystery in the physics, I think. What is the matter wave? What make the tunneling effect? Why we have to use the probability to describe the quantum world? There must be something we do not know yet. Is there any possibility to say that we can deal the quantum problem within the complex space, not in the Hibert space? Or is there any possibility to have a better describtion to the quantum world? Yes, I think it is.

I just found this. It's not quite Math or Maple related, but I'm sure most of you will appreciate it.

XKCD continues to post some great comics, often relating to math. Check this one out:

And yes, Maple does get it right

This post was generated using the MaplePrimes File Manager

View 1_epipi.mw on MapleNet or Download 1_epipi.mw
View file details

The appearance of this thread has degraded over the years, but most all post about the MRB constant can be found by entering "MRB constant" into the search box.

Some links were updated on June 26, 2010.

I found some comments in my blog written in inappropriate tone and style and asked the site administrator to move them from my blog to this person's blog who posted them. However, my repeated requests were rejected. A blog is not a forum where everybody's posts are appropriate. A blog is a personal place on the web, something like a part of your home. And you can choose whom to invite to your home and who is not desirable - that is a standard policy regarding blogs, I think. Also, if somebody wouldn't like to see my comments in his/her blog, I would be happy to put them in my blog and not in that person's blog who objects to them.

A few years ago I saw somewhere in a math forum a brain-teaser type problem which I'm about to present. I wasn't able to solve it at the time. I haven't been able to find the original forum, so I don't know whether or not my answer is right. I do know that I could never have attacked the problem without MAPLE. We have a cube of edge a and a drill bit of diameter b. We drill one hole from the center of the front face to the center of the back face, and another from the center of the right face to the center of the left. What is the total volume of material removed? I get (Pi*(b^2)*a)/2 - ((2/3)*b^3) Am I right?

This page contains a great collection of different Maplets. Many users will be intersted in the Sudoku maplet. There are also some other interesting tools and games there. http://maplenet.msc.uky.edu/maplets/

これは私の最初のブログです。mapleprimesで日本語のブログは規則違反でしょうか・・・

I am looking for a job. Here is my vita.

After installing the critical security updates for Windows 2003 (August Bulletin) I've found that Maple 10 will no longer start. The splash screen appears though there is no progress bar. The splash screen (mws32.exe?) eventually dissapears silently leaving behind an orphaned maplew.exe.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with these updates?

Note: Classic Maple 10 starts with no problems.

Perseverance pays. As someone else commented, Maple has been around for a while and their are different packages that are kept for backward compatability but may be incompatible with more modern versions. Likewise the basic tools that take advantage of the new packages aren't always in place yet. Now that I have a better handle on this aspect of Maple's structure I am having many fewer issues. I now know how to recognize the symptoms of such collisions. More specifically, while I was originally frustrated with VectorCalculus I am now quite a fan once I got a hold of how it works. I just needed to translate how I do things on a blackboard (or on paper) to how Maple wants to see it. Beyond that, I also have to be able to explain what I am doing to others. For anyone moving along the same path I suggest going back to basics. I pulled an old vector calc. book off the shelf and re-examined how to think about the basic definitions (I teach physics, not math, so I tend to take a lazy "let's just get it done" approach to complex math problems). I then saw immediately what the programmers were trying to do and how they were doing it. I also found it helpful to build some visualization tools which will help this coming year as I build some presentations. By going through the process myself and reviewing how I would go about generalizing some of the problems encountered in vector calc I was able to understand the approach Maple was taking.

This is the kind of thing that can drive a beginner crazy. The behavior of the engine changes as a result of including different libraries. The engine isn't extended, it is changed. This makes for a very tough learning curve.