Alejandro,

Thank you. Today, trying to find a link to the site selling multiple monitors that I remember seeing in one of Jacques Carette posts, I looked here, after a long absence.

The situation has slightly changed - I have received a complimentary copy of Maple 12 recently (as a reward for stopping posting here, I guess), just didn't have time to install it yet.

I don't have much free time at the moment and I definitely won't be able to visit Waterloo in the nearest future, so I would like to take my nomination off the list.

Jacques Carette has the most points, and he, if I understand correctly, also has withdrawn his nomination. I am the second, and Robert Israel is the third in the list. Counting Robert Israel's posts in the Maple newsgroup, he would have much more points than any of us, including Carl Love (who would be second, I believe.)

I'm very glad to use this opportunity to support Robert Israel's nomination for that prestigious award.

Alec Mihailovs, PhD

LaTeX - yes. Proper - no.

Alec

That was one of the main things preventing me from using Mathematica for a long time. And now, after using it for a while, it still looks disgusting, both capitalizing S and square brackets.

Some time ago Richard Fateman pointed to me in his reply to my similar comment about Sin[x] that sin(x) is also actually not what we would normally use - we would write it sin x.

I read recently an interesing Stephen Wolfram's talk on special functions (at Oleg Marichev's Festscrift), and it had a picture of his 1979 notes about SMP, and they already had the Sin [ f ] notation.

There is an easy way to switch to the normal notation in the notebook - they call it TraditionalForm. Not that many people seem to be doing that though.

Alec

PS Camel-style notation, like LinearAlgebra is also disgusting, but Maple has already adopted it, as "industry standard" - the next step would be to adopt Sin[x] - and with the direction in which Maple development is going, who knows - that may happen pretty soon. - Alec

Some time ago, when I reported few bugs found by Vladimir Bondarenko and posted on his web site, I was told that I don't have to do that - his web site is in the list of sites monitored by Maplesoft, and there is a person entering bugs from there to Maplesoft database.

Now, that's interesting - Vladimir Bondarenko's site is monitored and this site is not?

About "talking" - I prefer doing stuff rather than talk about it. And I don't like such accusations. If this is considered to be an example of something that I was "talking" about and not doing, I can just stop "talking", at least on this site. Frankly, I don't completely understand how I got involved into this again instead of doing something useful.

Alec

I wonder where in the world is Sunday morning now. It is still Friday here.

One thing that can be seen from the first glance is that if beta is a function of 2 variables, its values should be obtained as beta(i,j) and not as beta[i,j].

Alec

Paulina,

I agree with what you said. And I don't feel very comfortable when people from Maplesoft active on this site, have to enter the bugs in the database, because it is also not there duty.

My personal problems with Maplesoft are related to the fact that while I was loyal to Maplesoft for many years, Maplesoft was not loyal to me.

Alec

It's not initial conditions for the differential equations.

Alec

It's not initial conditions for the differential equations.

Alec

I learned a lot from K. Geddes when I used to post in the Maple newsgroup. He didn't post often, but everything that he posted was very useful.

In particular, I started using eval instead of subs after his post with an explanation why it is better.

Also, I used to end procedures with evaluating the returned value. That was necessary for arrays, in particular. He explained to me that it is not necessary for Arrays, and provided some additional information about Arrays which was not in the help pages, I think.

There were many other cases - these 2 were the first that came to mind - and his name comes often to my mind when I use eval.

Alec

I learned a lot from K. Geddes when I used to post in the Maple newsgroup. He didn't post often, but everything that he posted was very useful.

In particular, I started using eval instead of subs after his post with an explanation why it is better.

Also, I used to end procedures with evaluating the returned value. That was necessary for arrays, in particular. He explained to me that it is not necessary for Arrays, and provided some additional information about Arrays which was not in the help pages, I think.

There were many other cases - these 2 were the first that came to mind - and his name comes often to my mind when I use eval.

Alec

This is, by the way, an interesting example of an expression evaluated as a limit not at "singularity",

singular(exp(x)-13);
                           {x = infinity}
exp(-infinity)-13;
                                 -13

Now, I am still trying to understand what a singularity means in Maple. Is anywhere in the help a definition of it? None of the definitions of a singularity in the Dictionary seem to be working here. Why infinity is a singularity in this example and -infinity is not?

Is anywhere in the help the explanation of the following,

1/infinity;
                                  0

or other operations with infinities? I'm not saying that that doesn't make sense. It makes sense, just not in usual mathematical context.

Alec

Maybe, you need Maple 12 for that. I don't have Maple 11 to test.

Alec

Maybe, you need Maple 12 for that. I don't have Maple 11 to test.

Alec

On this site, a better place may be your blog. It is easier to find such things in blogs than in forums. And it may get to the front page from there.

Outside of this site, Maple application center may be a good place, Maple wiki, or arxiv.

Alec

As I see it (and I taught Calculus for more than 30 years), all the exceptions and special cases needed for teaching Calculus, are also very algorithmic. I tried to think about that, and to find an example that couldn't be implemented in a CAS, and I couldn't find one.

The approach of going through Calculus textbooks and implementing the examples and exercises from them seems to be exactly right. As I already said, it would be easier to do starting first from kindergarten, elementary school and high school textbooks.

With complex numbers, the situation is not that simple. If they are implemented correctly, they could be very useful. Unfortunately, the implementation of them in Maple is very basic and in many aspects wrong. It makes many things more complicated instead of making them more simple.

Alec