Application Centre Highlights
Animations Contest
From time to time, users submit stunning Maple
animations to the Application Centre. Wondering what the
Maple community would come up with given the incentive,
we sponsored an Animation Contest in which users could show
off their Maple dexterity and display the fun side of Maple.
While the competition was underway, an online Animations
Gallery was designed to allow visitors to view Maple animations
in one centralised location at Maple
Animations Gallery This gallery quickly grew to nearly
100 animations as the contest drew to a close on July 2,
2001. Some of the more imaginative submissions included
a swinging snowman, an earthquake simulation, and a tightrope-walking
ballerina. But the most impressive entry, and winner of
the contest, was a motion picture called Magic Trick, in
which a magician’s hat and wand bring geometric objects
to life. Magic Trick uses matrix algebra and Maple’s
plottools package to manipulate the 3-D objects. The author
of this animation is Peter Lassen, a graduate student from
the Technical University
of Denmark.
Christian Andersen, a student from the Technical University
of Denmark, created the Swinging Snowman animation, in which
a large snowman oscillates a stick while a baby snowman
swings on a circular swing to its right. Throughout the
animation, randomly generated snowflakes blissfully fall
from the sky.
Thomas Stoll and Klaus Thoni’s earthquake animation
simulates the effects of an earthquake on a skyscraper.
As the earthquake strikes and intensifies, the skyscraper
is not able to withhold the force when the windows shatter,
and the antennae on top of the building falls over. The
simulation defines the mechanical system using the linalg
package and solves systems of linear differential equations.
5th grader Becca Yasskin created the tightrope-walking
ballerina. This animation utilised Maple’s plottools
package to show a ballerina walking a tightrope with an
umbrella in her hand. As the ballerina approaches the middle
of the rope, the rope breaks and the hapless ballerina takes
a rapid plunge. The animation ends with a comical twist
when the ballerina shouts, "Ouch. Forgot the net!"
The Maple Animations Gallery illustrates both the versatility
and the fun side of this powerful mathematical software.
Hopefully, the Animations Gallery will spark some ideas
of your own. You might be surprised by what you come up
with.
