Welcome to the Adept Scientific Press Room

Interview with Kazuo Tanaka, Chief D. Engineer at Canon Inc.

Q: How did you start using Maple?

“I was introduced to Maple about five or six years ago. I had completed my engineering education and I had been working in the field of optical research and development for many years. At the time, I was working with a team developing an optical zoom lens and I was responsible for some on the job training. I used Maple 4 for preparing the teaching material. I found it to be very convenient and efficient.”

“More recently, I have used Maple for producing presentation material, as well as the educational material for training other training specialists. I found Maple to be very user friendly. It is remarkable that we can rotate or change the direction of 3-D graphics so easily, just by just using a mouse, and that we can easily output complicated calculations, sometimes using animations, in HTML format. The best thing is that I can adapt Maple so that it is most suitable for my purposes.”

Q: How would you describe ‘analytical computational software’?

“If one chooses, analytical computational software can be used simply as a calculator, but its strength lies in the visualisation of data. It enables you to analyse or evaluate formulas and data from diverse perspectives. It also functions as an interpreter so, for example, if you want to give a representation about undulation, you can do more than just draw a sine curve on a two-dimensional plane. You can move it along the temporal axis, modifying the results in real time. Undoubtedly, visualising the results in this way helps in immediate comprehension. Maple has excellent drawing capacity and is not restricted to two-dimensional images.”

Q: What features increase the effectiveness of your work?

“Occasionally, there are times, when you want exact evaluation, such as calculating exact roots. For practical purposes, one more often prefers to round up pi to a certain decimal, for example. Maple can be used in either way, evaluating exact roots, or, if you specify a floating decimal point, obtaining approximations instead. Another strength of Maple is that it can be linked with MATLAB, in order to carry out very complicated engineering-specific calculations.”

Maple is available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and various UNIX platforms. Full details are available at http://maple.adeptscience.co.uk. Maple is supplied and supported in the UK and Ireland by Adept Scientific plc, Amor Way, Letchworth, Herts. SG6 1ZA; telephone (01462) 480055, fax (01462) 480213, email maple@adeptscience.co.uk; a wide variety of full and upgrade licence options is available from Adept Scientific for academic and commercial users.

With offices in the UK, USA, Germany and throughout the Nordic region, Adept Scientific is one of the world’s leading suppliers of software and hardware products for research, scientific, engineering and technical applications on desktop computers.