Whenever I visit San Diego, I never miss a chance to go up to Palomar Observatory. It is the home of the legendary Hale 200 inch telescope that was the reigning champion among telescopes until about 25 years ago. It is perched atop Palomar mountain and the building is open to the public. You can see through a window, the famed instrument though you cannot actually approach it. The telescope aside, it's an amazing drive from San Diego to the mountain as it goes through some of the most scenic areas in Southern California. If you have half a day or if you're driving from San Diego to Los Angeles, it's a great way to see the country and to visit a significant site. Great picnic areas and a little gift shop as well.

Sage, and Pari are specialized computer algebra systems. This online tool offers convenient access to these systems.

Professor Mark Bridges of Northeastern University has been compling a blog of commentary on various mathematical references that one encounters on the TV show Numb3rs. See his BLOG site and a recent news article.

What is the latest version of Maple 10 available? ( as in 10.x)

I'd like to gauge interest in an online session on authoring Maple documents using new features in Maple 10: document blocks, embedded components, tables, autoexec code, task templates, embedded assessment, 2d math, etc. Would you participate in such a (free) session? -Laurent

Similarly to searching of digits of π, Maple can access other Internet resources. In particular, here is an example of accessing MAGMA through William Stein's online SAGE/MAGMA/PARI calculator,

i am trying to solve: L_fire_7 := 0.5*trans_7 * p *((2 * h * c^2 / (lambda_7)^5) * (1 / (exp(h*c/(k*lambda_7*T)) -1))) = L7; L_fire_21 := 0.83*trans_21 * p *((2 * h * c^2 / (lambda_21)^5) * (1 / (exp(h*c/(k*lambda_21*T)) -1))) = L21; for T and p using PolynomialSystem. the result contains _X. i have no idea what that symbol means and can't find anything in the manual nor on the web. any help is highly appreciated! (also in regard to how to solve this better than using PolynomialSystem). -florian

Will mentioned in his blog a problem of finding the first occurence in π the given sequence of digits - a birthday, for example. It can be done in Maple through the search engine at http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery as follows,

FYI, a few people have reported the activation e-mails that is sent after registration is not arriving. If you are a new user and you don't receive a message from us within one hour, please e-mail us. Thanks for your patience. T4.

Find out if your birthday is contained in the digits of Pi. First posted in Will's blog.

This site lets you enter your birthday as a sequence of numbers and it checks to see if that sequence of digits exists in the first 1254543 digits of Pi. Mine (12221982) wasn't in it, Maybe yours is. You can also enter any other sequence of digits to see if they exist as well. It probably would be simple to do this in Maple. Maybe it would work even better. Here is a challenge then, write a Maple application that does the same thing but to a greater number of digits. Link Via (CowPi)

I put on PhiMaTeX a simple sheet implementing first steps in percolation simulation : Percolation

It is hard to follow up the Math Rap, but the Pi Song is pretty geeky too. And it is kind of catchy. I wish it went on longer. Link (Via Trixie)

My thanks to Prof. Meade and Prof. Harrington for their suggestions on how to increase "maxmesh" or "abserr". Prof. Harrington's suggestion about adding 'maxmesh=500' as an option in dsolve didn't pan out, but I'll try other numbers--I understand the maximum is about 8000 plus. Prof. Meade's suugestion about adding "abserr=1e-4" also didn't pan out (on my Maple 9.5--Prof.Meade seems to be using Maple 10,though this shouldn't make a difference,methinks!) However,adding abserr=1e-3 as an option to dsolve DOES work! Very strange indeed. Anyway,I've got my graph,and thanks again to Prof. Meade et al.