A selection of New and Enhanced Maple features Introduced in Recent Years.

What’s New in Maple 8

• New VectorCalculus package.
• New solvers to PDEs with boundary conditions.
• Calculus of Variations - central to many advanced modelling areas such as mechanics and FEM.
• New Calculus Education package - amongst other functions, you can now “step” through the solutions of many calculus problems and interactively apply standard rules.
• You can now build customised graphical interfaces to your Maple worksheets through built-in Maplets technology.
• New ScientificConstants package - an extensive library of standard physical constants.
• Dialogue interface to build complex plots.
• Built-in spell checker.
• Ability to email your current worksheet.
• Enhanced mathematics display (set operations, base vector notation etc).
• You can now generate Java code as well as C and Fortran from your Maple procedures.

New in Maple 7

• Better connectivity to the web by the use of TCP/IP sockets; sockets package allows users to pull information from the Web into Maple.
• Support for XML and MathML.
• RealDomain package forces functions to assume arguments are real.
• Handling of ODEs and PDEs improved; “Stopping” criteria can now be specified.
• Improved integration of NAG numerical solvers.
• You can now specify dimensions.
• New Units package.
• Documentation enhanced: “Getting Started” guide introduced; “Learning Guide” rewritten.

New in Maple 6

• Numerical abilities greatly enhanced with integration of NAG’s linear algebra routines into Maple through the LinearAlegbra package: new data structures, matrix manipulation.
• Enhancements to plots: legends, multi-line titles, vertical axis labelling.
• New document processing capabilities: page numbering, export to RTF, hide and restore specific elements such as spreadsheets, graphics etc.
• Improvements to handling of discontinuities, integers, quintics etc.
• Programming language enhanced: you can now use “end if” instead of “fi” and “end do” instead of “od”; define your own programming “modules”; and many more programming enhancements.
• “Programming guide” expanded and enhanced.
• Palettes, spreadsheets and context-sensitive menus enhanced.
• You can now have larger palettes to reduce eye strain!
• Integration with Microsoft Excel: you can access Maple commands from Excel, or access spreadsheet elements from the command line.
• FlexLM network licensing now introduced: makes it easy to control usage and ensure compliance with licence terms.

New in Maple V Release 5

• Palettes to insert mathematical expressions introduced, reducing the need to remember syntax.
• Ability to insert and execute mathematical functions from context- sensitive right mouse button menus.
• You can expand, simplify and plot functions among many other operations.
• Real-time rotation and manipulation of 3D plots.
• Smartplot command introduced.
• You can insert spreadsheet elements in your worksheet.
• The spreadsheet can execute both symbolic and numerical functions on expressions in its cells.
• DETools package enhanced: method of solution of a large class of differential equations can be obtained.
• PDE solving greatly enhanced and a new PDETools package introduced.
• “Lexical scoping” introduced to the programming language.
• A procedure can now use variables from any enveloping procedure.
• New link to MATLAB.
• Export to HTML introduced.

New in Maple V Release 4

• Major improvements to the analytical and numerical solution of ODEs.
• PDE package introduced.
• You can have typeset maths in input, output and text regions.
• “Syntax error” is replaced with more meaningful comments.
• The cursor is placed at the point where the error is detected.
• You can now define the level of verbosity of the error messages.
• Assumptions of the domain of variables have been strengthened.
• Piecewise functions can now be differentiated, integrated, plotted
• and can now be used in other parts of Maple.
• Improvements to the user interface, including more extensive online help, the ability to remove headings for an uncluttered display, the option to enlarge worksheets, and the ability to structure documents as “trees”.
• Hyperlinks can be used in worksheets.
• Fixes to bugs in Maple V R3.

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