Article: Now it really adds up

The potential applications and the flexibility of the world’s best PC-based maths software have been substantially increased with new Maple 8. SAMIR KHAN previews it here.

When it comes to working with true mathematics on the PC, Maple has long been the most powerful and widely-used software available. With a huge worldwide user base in research, industry, business and education, Maple also now has the momentum to power on with further improvements and new features. Maple 8, the very latest version, is due for release this month. The devel-opments begin with what the authors call the “reinvention” of the Maple graphical interface. A new built-in technology called Maplets actually allows you to create your own graphical user interfaces to Maple. Users of your Maple applications can be given access through buttons, text areas, menus, and other graphical elements that you specify. Your Maple code recedes safely into the background, sparing users from having to understand its syntax or enter Maple commands.

For educational use, Maplets provides a natural medium for creating tutorials. Another example might be an Interactive Plot Builder, where a user can create plots through a built-in maplet that prompts for all relevant plotting options in text areas and menus. No more remembering plot commands and their many options!

Anyone using Maple in science and engineering almost certainly needs to refer to standard texts frequently. Now Maple sets out to minimise this effort, by including a large quantity of scientific data itself. Avogadro’s number? The proton magnetic shielding correction? The program includes these and over 13 000 other scientific constants from physics and chemistry. If you need to look up the ionisation energy of iodine, don’t get up, because Maple 8 already knows the Periodic Table. With a single command, you can access the basic chemical properties of any element or isotope. If the Maple 8 database of constants doesn’t suffice for your application, you can easily extend or change it.

There's more. The new Maple 8 numeric PDE- solver can solve linear systems of PDEs with boundary conditions. You can exploit the flexibility of Java classes by automatically translating your Maple results into Java code ...and you can also call static Java methods externally from Maple 8 applications. Maple 8 provides a new package of functions for vector calculus, and you can now compute geodesics and other optimal functionals with ease using the new Maple 8 VariationalCalculus package.

More than ever, Maple deserves a close look. There's a good new brochure available, which is well worth a read.