I’m absolutely delighted to announce the launch of Maple 2025!

Although you see a new release every year, new features take anything from a few fast-paced weeks to develop, to months of careful cultivation.

Working on so many features in parallel, each with varying time scales, isn't easy! We have to fastidiously manage and track our work.

So it's easy to lose ourselves in the daily minutiae of software development. To help us maintain perspective, we constantly ask ourselves questions like:

• What user problem are we solving and how often does this problem occur?
• Can we validate our proposed solution with preliminary user feedback?
• Is this a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and will never exist, or are we pre-empting a future need?
• Are we offering value to our users?

Given the answers, we course-correct to make sure we stay on track for our central mission - to make you happy, and to keep you coming back year-after-year.

With Maple 2025, I think we've smashed that goal. We have many new features that'll appeal to many different types of users - from students, educators and mathematicians, to engineers, scientists and technical professionals

Let me walk you through some of my personal highlights.

It’ll be difficult for anyone to miss this - Maple 2025 has a new interface! It’s a ribbon-based UI that look clean and contemporary, and helps you find and discover tools more quickly than before.

You have large, meaningful icons.

Items are logically grouped.

The ribbons is contextual. If you click on a plot, you get new tabs for interacting with and drawing on the plot.

A new Education tab collects pedagogical resources that were scattered around the interface in prior releases.

This is the biggest visual overhaul to Maple in many years. We hope you like it! 

We also appreciate that changes in look and feel can be divisive. Please rest assured that we will refine and finesse the interface with each successive release; your comments and suggestions are most welcome.

The new interface is available on Windows and Linux, and as a technology preview on Mac.

The right arrow key on my keyboard is wearing out…and it’s all because of Maple. I’m knee deep in Maple nearly every day entering equations, and I’m always using right-arrow to move the cursor. It gets kind of tedious!

This anecdote reflects some investigative work we did. We comprehensively examined our internal library of thousands of Maple worksheets and discovered that these three input patterns are extremely common.

Previously, you’d use the right-arrow key to move the cursor out of the exponential, division or subscript.

Now, in Maple 2025, when you

• type ^, /, or enter a literal subscript with a double-underscore,
• followed by a number or symbol
• and then input another operator (such as +)

the operator is automatically inserted on the baseline (except when y = 1).

Of course, you can also make the cursor return to or stay in the exponent or denominator with a simple keystroke, when that is what is needed.

This is one of those little quality of life refinements that I’m very fond of - it’s a little visual and usability dopamine hit.

The sum command (and its typeset form) now indexes into vectors without you needing to spam unevaluation quotes all over your expression.

We’ve been integrating units deeper into the Maple system, release after release. Much of this is driven by our engineering users.

A few releases ago, we made int(numeric) compatible with units. With Maple 2025, you can now numerically differentiate  expressions and procedures that have units.

I’m a grizzled thermodynamics hack, so here’s an example in which I calculate the specific heat capacity of water by differentiating enthalpy with respect to temperature (and then confirm the result with the built-in value):

This is in addition to many other improvements to the units experience.

Although this is a part of Maple that I don’t touch often (my colleague Karishma takes point on the education side), I REALLY wish I’d had this when I was struggling with math.

You can now automatically generate unlimited variants of the same problem for students to solve with the Try Another feature, which has been added to Maple’s Check My Work tools (another feature I really could have used!). This is available for many common math principles, including factorization, simplification, integration and more.

This is just one of the improvements in Maple 2025 for teaching and learning.

 If you’ve ever found yourself going back and forth (and back and forth) between two large, almost identical-looking Maple expressions, trying to figure out how they are different, you’re going to love this one.  ExpressionTools is a new package that lets you compare the differences between two expressions.

I really like the use of color to highlight differences. Less squinting at the screen!

You can now run Maple Flow worksheets from Maple (you don’t need Maple Flow installed to do this). You can send parameters into the Flow worksheet and extract your desired results.

This means you can use the entire flexibility of Maple to analysis and manipulate your Flow worksheet. You could, for example:

• Attach a Flow worksheet to a Maple workbook and create an interactive application
• Carry out parameter studies of a Flow worksheet by evaluating it over many parameter sets in Maple
• Create an Excel interface for a Flow worksheet using the Maple add-in for Excel

Simplify is one of those functions that literally tens of thousands of people use each day. Every time we make an incremental improvement, the cumulative benefits across our entire user base are significant.

We’ve refined simplify in a number of critical ways. For example, simplify now recognizes when exponentials can be profitably converted to hyperbolic trig functions:

The analysis of many scientific phenomena result in Laplace transforms that do not have a symbolic inverse which can be expressed in terms of elementary functions. This includes applications in heat transfer, fluid mechanics, fractional diffusion processes, control systems and electrical transmission.

For example, this monster Laplace transform results from an analysis of voltage on a transmission line:

You can now numerically invert this transform courtesy of an enhancement to inttrans:-invlaplace - a fast quadrature method.

I’ve saved what I think has the most future potential for last.

I’m sure nearly all of you have experimented with the various AI tools. They’re an inevitable part of our present and future, whether we're comfortable with it or not.

This is something we've been mulling over for some time.

• In Maple 2019, the DeepLearning package made its debut. This package provides tools for machine learning, supporting operations such as classification and regression using neural networks.
• In Maple 2024, we introduced an AI-powered formula lookup feature.

In Maple 2025, we’re giving you an early-stage technology preview of AI-powered document generation.

You can automatically generate worksheet content by prompting an AI, and then gradually refine the content

If you’re an educator, you might want some content that describes applications of calculus. So you might ask the AI “How do I derive the formula for the area of a circle” by entering your prompt into this text box:

This is the worksheet content that may be returned:

If you’re structural engineer who wants to know how to calculate the hardness of concrete, you might ask the AI: “How do I calculate the compressive strength of slow hardening concrete as a function of time? Use the CEB-FIP Model Code 90. Include a worked example with Maple code”.

This worksheet content that could be generated (note the live Maple code):

We’re labelling AI-generated worksheet content as a technology preview. You might see

• text that might be misleading (but sounds plausible)
• code that doesn’t work (but looks plausible)
• or different results each time you click “Generate Document”

For the moment, I would not rely on AI-generated worksheet content without realistic expectations, a healthy dose of scepticism and a modicum of detached analysis. But AI models are rapidly growing in robustness, and we want to position ourselves to best exploit their future potential. The next few years will be VERY exciting.

We can never cover everything in a short blog post like this. So if you want to know more, head on over to the What’s New pages for Maple 2025!

The Maplesoft Physics Updates, introduced over a decade ago, brought with them an innovative concept: to deliver fixes and new developments continuously, as soon as they enter the development version of the Maple library for the next release. A key aspect of this initiative was prioritizing the resolution of issues reported on MaplePrimes, ensuring that fixes became available to everyone within 24 to 48 hours. Initially focused solely on the Physics package, the scope of the updates quickly expanded to include other parts of the Maple library and the Typesetting system.

This initiative, which I developed outside regular work hours, aimed to enhance the Maple experience—where issues encountered in daily use could be resolved almost immediately, minimizing disruptions and benefiting the entire user community through shared updates.

As of January 1st, I have stepped away from my role at Maplesoft and have been increasingly involved in activities unrelated to Maple. This raises the question of what will happen with the Physics Updates for Maple 2025 and after.

The Physics project remains a unique and personally meaningful endeavor for me. So, for now, I will continue to dedicate some time to these Updates—but only for the Physics package, not for other parts of the library. As before, these fixes and developments will be included in the Physics Updates only after they have been integrated into the development version of Maple’s official library for the next release. In that sense, they will continue to be Maplesoft updates.

On that note, the first release of the Physics Updates for Maple 2025—focused solely on the Physics package—went out today as version 1854. To install it, the first time open Maple 2025 and use the Maplecloud toolbar -> Packages, or else input PackageTools:-Install(5137472255164416). Any next time, just enter Physics:-Version(latest)

As for fixes beyond the Physics package, I understand that Maplesoft is exploring the possibility of offering something similar to what was previously delivered through the Maplesoft Physics Updates.

All the best

PS: to install the last version of the Maplesoft Physics Updates for Maple 2024, open Maple and input Physics:-Version(1852), not 1853.
 
Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab
Physics, Differential Equations, and Mathematical Functions
Maplesoft Emmeritus
Research and Education—passionate about all that.