It is an interesting post. 

It would also be interesting to see a comparison of two routes on fuel mileage.  One in particular I had in mind was a 12km route of 100km/h hwy driving one stop sign at the 11.5 km mark onto a 70 km/h hwy to the join point.  The other route is through town and only 10km but with 5 stop lights and two stop signs but where max speed shouldn't exceed 60- 70km/h.

On average it is a good estimate to say it roughly costs 10 cents per km for ease of calculations.  Tracking my two cars so far the average it costs me to drive is 8.6 and 8.4 cents per km (hyundai touring standard transmission and honda civic automatic transmission respectively) and the fuel mileage 7.2 and 6.8 L/100km (or 14.5 and 15.1 km/L). The best I ever got for both cars was 5.9 L/100km or 16.9km/L.

Now based on distance alone it's going to cost me in my civic 84 cents to go through town or $1.01 rounding up to go the highway route.  But am I really going to save almost 20 cents going through town?  Lots of possible stops along the way, it would be interesting to use statistics here.  Some lights are longer than others and what's the probabilities that you would hit all the lights green?  .. or red?  How about your wait time at the stop signs?  Some are longer than others.  ... I wonder if we could use a Markov chain here?

And then there's the drag coefficient that really bites into your mileage along the highway and that won't be that much of a factor driving through town, but your engine will be running longer guzzling fuel at those stop lights and stop signs.  So fuel mileage wise, does it work out even in the end?  Then there's a time factor.  Which route is the fastest? and how much time do you save?

Perhaps a general equation could be derived based on the number of stop signs, stop lights and speed limit along your route that would closely estimate how much your drive would cost? 

@Carl Love Never before now have I heard of osculating before.  Hence I mis-interperetted it as a spelling error for oscillating.  Now it is clear.  A simple look up in google would have spared me.

Can you show what you have done so far?  It is not clear what this red oscillating circle is, I am guessing it rolls back and forth within the ellipse?

Animating the graph still gives the best visualization. 

Animating the graph still gives the best visualization. 

Anyone else have any favorite memories or stories out there?

Scale works great.  The style=points option originally was intended to keep the responsiveness as high as possible.  The style=patchnogrid option was also what was intended. 

Scale works great.  The style=points option originally was intended to keep the responsiveness as high as possible.  The style=patchnogrid option was also what was intended. 

Thanks for the options. The 3d rotatable image is preferred.  Just didn't know if that was the fastest option for that many points.  It would be okay to reduce the number of points and reduce the granularity of the image, not sure which way is best though.

Wouldn't style=patchnogrid be similar to using the surfdata?

Thanks for the options. The 3d rotatable image is preferred.  Just didn't know if that was the fastest option for that many points.  It would be okay to reduce the number of points and reduce the granularity of the image, not sure which way is best though.

Wouldn't style=patchnogrid be similar to using the surfdata?

@herclau The attachments are plain text.  A webpage location would be better. 

I am not exactly sure of the application but does it have something to do with measuring circles using the hough transform on an image?  A web link would clarify.

@geri23 Regarding books - aside from the product Manuals available on Maplesofts website. 

I would suggest Programming in Maple - The Basics by Michael Monagan which can be found on this webpage http://www.asc.tuwien.ac.at/compmath/

Another excellent resource is here http://www.peterstone.name/Maplepgs/maple_index.html

Even though it is old I would also suggest Introduction to Maple by Andre Heck.

The application center is also a good resource, there exists complete sets of lessons for caluculs I, II, III and IV, classical mechanics, and cryptography. 

I think that's a pretty good start.

An interesting walk through history.  Maple has come a long way. 

While waiting in line at the Waterloo computer store, which I think was actually in the Math building at the time in 1991, I was holding a boxed Maple V R3 version of Maple worth $125 which to this day sits on my shelf above my computer.  I even have the reciept inside the box, I used Maple many times back then, for my first year University and partly in my fourth.  I seem to have lost track because V r4 and V r5 then Maple 6, 7, 8, 9 and 9.5 happened before I realized Maple again at version 10.  Maple 12 being one of my favorite versions where I've spent more time using Maple than ever.  Now I can't believe we're already at Maple 17!

@ostadfar Just a quick suggestion to use F5 to toggle between text you just want to write out and Math you want calculated.

I would like to be able to see a dotted line where a page ends on a worksheet.  Rather than going back and forth checking adjusting.  It is for convenience, a view page line option.  A feature request on future versions.