In late July, the International Congress on Mathematical Software (ICMS 2026) came to the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University. Maplesoft had the privilege of sponsoring this year's event, and on the first evening of the conference we opened our Waterloo office for a reception, welcoming around 140 researchers, professors, students, and developers from around the world for an evening of food, demos, and good conversation. Among the many brilliant guests were the ICMS General Chair Bernard Mourrain and Local Organization Chairs Stephen M. Watt and Ilias S. Kotsireas.

About 30 of us pitched in to organize, demo, and host, turning our office into a packed social hub for the evening. Our CEO, Dr. Laurent Bernardin, opened the evening with some welcome remarks and a talk on math education in the age of AI, tying into the recent launch of the Math Success Platform - a new tool built on Maple to help educators understand where students are struggling and provide more targeted support.

I, alongside the other co-op students for this term, got the opportunity to volunteer at one of the demo booths, where we showed off the new AI Assistant and Document Import features in Maple 2026, as well as the Maple MCP Server. Two live examples in particular seemed to resonate quite well with our guests...

The first was a demonstration of the Document Import tool. We brought messy handwritten multivariable calculus notes, outlining limit definitions and squeeze theorem example problems, and scanned them directly into Maple. Within seconds, the handwriting was converted into a functional Maple worksheet, math and all, right down to preserving the hand-drawn graphs. The worksheet was ready to be edited and executed just like anything typed in natively. A skeptical guest even asked us to scan their research papers - written completely in German - just to see the import work in this case as well, and it did, intelligently creating a worksheet with collapsible sections for each individual topic. For a room full of people who spend their careers working with mathematical software, this feature got a reaction every single time.

The second was Maple's AI assistant, specifically its ability to generate and debug Maple code within the context of your workspace. We loaded a worksheet with a spherical coordinates problem - calculating the volume of the upper half of a sphere with radius 4 - and simply prompted the AI Assistant to create a 3D diagram with interactive sliders to help visualize the problem. Moments later, it had analyzed the sheet and written a working code block for generating a fully interactive 3D visualization, letting guests drag each slider and watch the diagram update in real time across the sphere. It turned an abstract triple integral into something you could physically manipulate and understand, which for a lot of students really helps make these topics click.

Working the demo booth was a rewarding experience for all of us co-op students, as researchers asked some tough, thought-provoking questions that pushed us to think on our feet and imagine new ways to use the very tools we were demonstrating.
Beyond the demos, it was also just a great chance to talk with inspiring figures in the world of mathematics - hearing what ambassadors are building with Maple day-to-day, swapping stories with both students and professors on their academic experiences, and getting a glimpse into just how wide and varied the math software community really is. It's not every day that I get to spend time chatting with the people actually shaping the field I'm studying.

Thank you to the ICMS for bringing the international math software community to our door. It made for one of the most memorable evenings of our time as Maplesoft co-op students!