Categories

Every four years, the world comes together to watch one of the most anticipated sporting events in history: the FIFA World Cup.

Behind all the anticipation, venue planning, and media fanfare, there are many artists and researchers who devote themselves to designing a new FIFA World Cup ball to be rolled out for the public eye (pun intended).

This post presents an overview of the geometric ideas behind the design of the FIFA 2026 "Trionda" ball, using Maple to visualize and explore these concepts in depth. The ideas presented here were inspired by this Scientific American Article. For more information and facts about the 2026 Trionda ball, as well how the shape of the ball impacts play on the pitch, I suggest you check it out!

FIFA ball designs are often inspired by one of the 5 Platonic solids. A Platonic solid is a convex polyhedron with each face being the same regular polygon with the same number of faces meeting at each corner.

This year, the Trionda ball was constructed from the simplest of these shapes, the tetrahedron, consisting of 4 triangles, with 3 faces meeting at each corner. Of the five Platonic solids, this shape has the fewest faces, making it the least sphere-like. Turning such a simple polyhedron into a smooth ball is therefore a surprisingly challenging geometric problem.

So how can we turn our pointy tetrahedron into something that rolls? Rather than trying to transform the entire tetrahedron at once, we can start by redesigning a single triangular face. The goal is to create a curved triangle that will fit perfectly with three identical copies of itself while covering the surface of a sphere.

 

Hi Maple community and others,

I'm very proud to present my code.

Sequences are fun,
for those who know, about them

consider Fermat numbers, of the form,
F(n) = (2^(2^n)) + 1.
goes like

3, 5, 17, 257, 65537, 4294967297, 18446744073709551617, 
340282366920938463463374607431768211457, ...

in oeis.org database at
https://oeis.org/A000215 .

Similarly we can have base 3,

B(a) = (3^(3^a)) + 1.
goes like, this,
4,28,19684, ...
online, in database, with Universal Resource Location (URL)
https://oeis.org/A129290

There could also be base 4, that grows even faster
 

double_exponential_2_and_3_and_4.mw

That is all that I have, for now.

Thank you for this free forum.
regards,
Matt

Hi Maple community, and all,

Here is a little Maple worksheet, shoing an interesting property of prime numbers.

Numerical evidence supports Andreca's conjecture.

see    

_Andricas_conjecture.mw

good fun

see, also
Andrica's Conjecture -- from Wolfram MathWorld
Enjoy
regards,
Matt

PS online at https://MattAnderson.fun/

PPS Have a good day, everybody.

Last week, we launched the Maplesoft Math Success Platform. 
 

This launch reflects a lot of conversations I’ve had over the past year with educators and institutions about what it means to teach and learn math in the age of AI. 

At first, many of those conversations were about visibility. If students were completing homework, quizzes, and other assessments with help from AI, those results became harder to interpret. Did students understand the work, or had they copied down a solution that made sense in the moment without building the understanding needed to do something similar on their own?

That visibility still matters. 

Over time, though, those conversations led to a more nuanced conclusion. The question is not simply how we prevent students from taking shortcuts. It is how we help them develop the mathematical judgment, intuition, and critical thinking they will need in a world where AI is part of how they learn and work. 

In some ways, that has become even more important. When answers are easy to generate, students need to be able to test ideas, recognize when something does not make sense, explain their reasoning, and trust their own thinking. 

That is why I am proud to share the launch of the Maplesoft Math Success Platform. 

Built on Maple, the platform brings together our math technology and extends it with analytics, AI-driven insights, targeted resources, and content expertise to help institutions support math learning in a more complete way. 

It gives instructors and learning support teams better insight into where students are struggling, supports the creation of better questions and learning experiences, helps students move beyond the answer, and helps institutions respond to a world where AI is now part of how students practice, study, and get help. 

You can learn more about the Maplesoft Math Success Platform on our website.

We also wrote more about the thinking behind this launch in our new whitepaper, Math Education in the Age of AI: From Grading Answers to Understanding Student Progress. It looks at why math education needs a new approach in the age of AI: one that helps instructors ask better questions, create learning experiences that build understanding, and use learning signals to see where students need support.

I’d love to hear what you think. How are you seeing AI change the way students learn, practice, and get help in math? And what kinds of tools or approaches do you think will be most important as math education continues to evolve?

Little bit of a followup on the "Series Solutions of ODEs in Maple" online seminar.

According to Mathematical Methods for Physicists, 7th Edition by Arfken, Weber and Harris,

Pages 343-345,

Singular points are classified as regular or irregular

Irregular points are called essential singularies.

They show how to apply these to famous differential equations in Quantum Mechanics and other physical applications (examples given in Farlow's Partial Differential Equations for Scientists and Engineers).

In Section 12.1 of Mathematical Methods for Physicists, the complex series Laurent expansion (chapter 11 of the book) is applied to generalized to the complex plane (see Saff and Snider Fundamentals of Complex Analysis for Mathematics, Science and Engineering, 2nd Edition).  Not too sure how Maple handles contour integrals though.

It seems that a regular point is the same as a ordinary point, as per Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems, 8th Edition by Boyce and DiPrima, Chapter 5.

A little while ago, I created a video, Engaging and Enlightening Students with Maple Visualizations, that showed a sample of Maple visualizations that would be helpful in teaching math. Doing that allowed me to get reacquainted with some of Maple's plotting features that I hadn't used for a while. As a result, I made a second instructional video for my Maple tips series, Animating a Polyhedron in Maple. 

I chose this topic because I thought it would show several features in Maple that might not be known to all users. I list them below and encourage you to try them out.

• The plots:-polyhedraplot command allows you to create a 3-D plot of a polyhedron, including one of 138 polyhedra that Maple knows about.

• The list of named polyhedra available can be obtained by calling the plots:-polyhedra_supported command.

• The viewpoint option, which allows you to create an animation by varying the viewpoint through a 3D plot, can be used to rotate the polyhedron.

• Finally, the Export feature allows you to save the plot animation as an animated GIF.

Main worksheet [not all is displayed below]:

Download RootAnalysis4.mw

Download RootAnalysis5.mw

A note on what I've been working on for the past while. Some of you may have seen the announcement on LinkedIn yesterday; this is for the home audience.

The question I've been chasing is the one that's underneath the Physics package, the dsolve / pdsolve formal methods and heuristics, the advanced Mathematical Functions and FunctionAdvisor, and most of what I've written for Maple over the years. How can mathematicians and physicists speed up significantly their work using Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) and at the same time trust the result a computer hands back? The new chapter is what happens when AI sits between the human and the CAS, and the answer to that, in my view, turns out to be a much harder problem than the AI hype suggests.

Why? Because AI is increasingly the driver of computational mathematics in research, engineering, and education. And the unsolved problem isn't whether AI can do mathematics. It can. The problem is that an incorrect AI result arrives with the same confidence as a correct one.

On 100 challenging problems of undergraduate mathematics we tested, six independent state-of-the-art AIs returned mathematically equivalent answers on only 21% of them, and even within a single AI, repeated runs disagreed with themselves on 3% to 57% of the problems (details). The gap this validation crosses, between probabilistic inference and certified mathematical computation, is epistemological, not technological. It won't close with more training data. It needs validation across multiple AIs and multiple CAS, with no single engine having the final word.

ExaktAI aims to address that gap. It guides AI through mathematical computation, validates each step against Maple and Mathematica, and automatically generates and opens a corresponding CAS document where the validation can be audited and reproduced for every step, and where one can continue working on the problem. The goal: AI-mathematics that is validated, with the human in the loop.

ExaktAI is now well developed (TRL 6: System prototype demonstration in a simulated environment, on the ISED / Innovative Solutions Canada TRL scale). At the end an image. A Beta is scheduled for late summer / fall 2026; details at exaktai.ai.

In summary: ExaktAI is my present, and if you work on AI for mathematics and computer algebra, or the validation problem for AI, I'd love to hear your perspective.



Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab
ExaktAI
Research Fellow Emeritus at Maplesoft.

Hi MaplePrimes, and all,

Here is a new, to me, set of numbers
defined by ,
the first three numbers are {1,2,3}
and then, 
the next number is the sum of the three 
previous numbers,
so,
{1,2,3,6,11,20, ... }
but can only calculate a finite number of numbers
the, so called, Tribonacci numbers
could start with {0,1,0}
see online
https://oeis.org/A001590

and
triple_recursive_sequence_simple_first.mw

triple_recursive_sequence_simple_first.pdf

regards,
Matt
 

The new ribbon style user interface of recent Maple versions is well structured and visually much more appealing than the former user interface. Great for new users. However, I do not use the new Maple version for productive work because it is considerably slower to use: Much more clicks and mouse movements are involved than before, which breaks the flow.

To improve this situation, I thought about customizing the quick access toolbar with menu items that I need all the time. With Maple 2026 this suggestion has become a less viable solution because the quick access toolbar shrunk in size and moved to a screen location with low mouse activity (to get there fast, the mouse has to move back and forth like Speedy Gonzales). The tiny buttons in the toolbar are hard to distinguish and to hit in one go (a golfer might say “it's rare like an eagle”). If you disagree, try to write text and switch to non-executable math (to enter a symbol) and switch back to text and continue writing. Do the same with the former user interface (e.g. Maple 2024) and compare.

As a new suggestion I thought about adding a new tab "My Tab" to the ribbon that is customizable by the user. Here is what I would pick from the current ribbon items

(A subset from 4 out of 10 tabs: The Home, Insert, Edit and Help tab. The latter is less important)

I would probably also add these two items

although they do not fully replace the former buttons from the contextual tool bar

.

I use the above buttons from the former user interface allot in text passages to toggle between text and non-executable math. They are also useful to change the input mode of an empty document block (instead of inserting a new line with the desired input mode and deleting unwanted input lines). These buttons were introduced with Maple 2021 to improve usability, now they are gone and with it the ease of integrating math into text. With Maple 2026, I have to go back to using F5, which now “toggles” between three states (with the drawback that now in 1-D Math no indication of the state of the input mode is available on the user interface).

The above selection of menu items is my selection to work efficiently on textbook style Maple documents composed of explanatory text passages (including non-executable math) and Maple input and output. Other users would probably customize differently according to their needs.

A final remark about the undo function. Most software has undo on a top level. I do not understand why undo is not in the current quick access toolbar.

I strongly hope for productivity improvements that I can stop using Maple 2025.2 for Screen Readers (having the former user interface). Please do something to reduce mouse movements and clicks of frequently used interface functions. There is too much tab switching between the 3 most important tabs (Home, Insert, Edit) and too little functionality and ease of use of the quick access toolbar.

I would be interested to know which menu items other users would select.

Hi again Maple community, and others,

want to share
tiwn_and_cousin_prime_numbers.mw
tiwn_and_cousin_prime_numbers.pdf
(spelling error in file name)

~

just want to share,
some successful code

The lesser of the twin primes are listed
{3,5,11,17,29,41,59,71}
https://oeis.org/A001359
Prime numbers p such that p+2 is also a prime number

also, the lesser of the cousin primes are listed
{3,7,13,19,37,43,67,79,97}
https://oeis.org/A023200
prime numbers p such that p+4 is also a prime number

good fun

also, my webpage has more details
https://mattanderson.fun
okay

regards,
Matt

Would it be possible to include the file path in $File for the proposed header/footer insertions.

Thanks in advance

Peter

I am very pleased to announce the publication of my new book written together with Nic Fillion, "Perturbation Methods Using Backward Error", which uses Maple heavily throughout.

You can find it at

the SIAM bookstore

and I hope that you find it useful and interesting.

You can also find a paper in Maple Transactions, written with Michelle Hatzel, that explains how we generated the image that was chosen for the cover.  Exploring Cover Designs for an Upcoming Book  In the end, the SIAM design people chose a different one than we had thought, but they did pick one of the ones we generated!  

This was fun to do.

Over the past few months, I've created a number of short videos. My intention is to help people use Maple more effectively. I occasionally give workshops introducing Maple and its programming language, and many of the topics come from questions I get from the participants. 

These can be found on our Youtube channel. Here are the ones posted so far.

What is a Workbook?
Creating a Workbook
How to Customize Your Maple Settings with the Options Dialog
What is Maple Transactions?
How to Submit an Article to Maple Transactions
Quotation Marks in Maple
Using Single Quotes to Prevent Evaluation
 

If you find these helpful and have suggestions for future videos, please leave a comment, thanks!

> kernelopts(version);
Maple 2026.0, X86 64 LINUX, Apr 28 2026, Build ID 2011354