I have contributed another application to the Application Center: "Street-fighting Math".
This interactive Maple document contains a simple street-fighting game and performs a
mathematical analysis of it, involving probability and game theory.
I've submitted an application to the Application Center: An Epidemic Model (for Influenza or Zombies). This is an interactive Maple document, suitable for instructional use in an undergraduate course in mathematical biology or differential equations, or a calculus course that include differential equations. ...
My daughter the psychiatrist recently shared a link with me that mentioned a factoid about Facebook: "84 per cent of people think their friends have more friends than they do". Actually they don't just think this: for 84 percent of Facebook users, the median friend count of their friends is higher than their own friend count, according to
The "." notation for the dot product of Vectors is very convenient and intuitive. For example:
> <1,2,3> . <1,1,1>;
6
One sometimes annoying feature of it, however, is that by default Maple is using a dot product (suitable for Vectors with complex scalars) that is conjugate-linear in the first argument. But let's say you will only be working with real scalars. There's no problem if your Vectors have numeric entries, but...
I've submitted an application to the Application Center: Great Expectations. This is an interactive Maple document, suitable for instructional use in an undergraduate course in Probability. The mathematical content is related to the Laws of Large Numbers and Central
Limit Theorem. It requires no knowledge of Maple to use.
I'm happy to announce that, having retired from University of British Columbia, I've joined Maplesoft as a Content Developer. Some of my work will be appearing in the Application Center from time to time, and I'll announce them here. If you have any suggestions for topics you'd like to see in the Application Center, I'd be interested in seeing them.
I have uploaded to the Maplesoft Application Center a worksheet exploring the orbital dynamics of the recently discovered Kepler 16 system, where a planet orbits a double star.
Your comments and suggestions will be appreciated.
Click Maple Math, enter x^2/(1+x). The Preview disappears as soon as I press "/", and the result is not pretty-printed.
This is something I produced for my Calculus students. It is based on some actual research in Biology by Larry Dill of Simon Fraser University, showing that the escape response of the Zebra Danio, a small tropical fish, is triggered when the rate of change of the visual angle of a potential predator becomes too large (see ugrad.math.ubc.ca/coursedoc/math102/keshet.notes/chapter11Notes.pdf, section 11.2).
Here's my Maple document.
A recent posting of Mario Lemelin showed that Maple's default numerical methods produced wrong results for a certain differential equation. Further investigation revealed that the problem stemmed from the fact that the fourth and fifth order Runge-Kutta methods used within the rkf45 method both produce the same (exactly correct) result at any step size, causing the adaptive error analysis to go badly wrong. This leads to the question: when do Runge-Kutta methods produce exact results for arbitrary step sizes and initial conditions?
For a partial answer, see this worksheet: View 4541_runge.mw on MapleNet or Download 4541_runge.mw
I've made up a worksheet of the Top Ten Maple Errors, containing some of the common mistakes I often see newcomers to Maple commit (especially in the setting of my Introduction to Mathematical Computing class). I hope you will find it useful in trying to avoid those mistakes. Of course this is only a personal list, and not exhaustive. Please feel free to argue the merits of other items that should be included in the list.
Here is the link:
View 4541_topten.mw on MapleNet or
We're running Maple 11 in a lab of about 40 MiniMacs (MacOS X).
Normally, there is a Preferences choice under Maple 11 on the menu. But one student had no Preferences there (or anywhere else that I could find: in particular, not under Tools, where Options would be under Windows). What's going on?
