In the Physics package (in Physics:-Vectors, to be more precise), 3-vectors are advantageously represented as

v_:=v1*_i+v2*_j+v3*_k;

with the _i etc. being the unit vectors. I would like to be able to plot these on occasion, either as individual vectors or the line connecting the end points. I can use Component to get at the individual numbers and get this done, but I would like to overload the plot command to do this in a more natural fashion.

By poking...

I ran into an interesting situation with numeric integration.

For a simulation task I need to evaluate an overlap integral of a pair of 3-d ellipsoids which have a certain aspect ratio and the axes of which are tilted against each other. The distribution in each plane is Gaussian, but with largely differing sizes. While I have an analytic expression for the result; the integration (along a certain direction) cannot be done analytically and so I integrate numerically....

One of those vexing things that should be easy:

I am reading in a data file using ImportMatrix. Since the file has one column with texual data I cannot use datatype=float since that bombs. I >can< ImportMatrix with datatype=string or anything.

I then extract columns using the appropriate command and want to do something numeric with them (only with those columns that have correct floating point numbers). That fails since my data are now not floats (even when using anything...

Hi all,

I am looking for a package to calculate the power mean (or Hölder mean) defined like

Mean_p(x_n)=(1/N Sum(x_n^p,n=1..N))^(1/p)

in a hopefully obvious notation. I can obviously implement this definition directly in Maple, but there are subtleties (like the limit of p=0) which maybe a mature implementation already covers (?).

I am still mostly on Maple 15 which does not have such a Mean. If 16 or 17 have it I would not becessarily know.

So I have this long-ish for...do...end do loop that involves all sort of things incl. running an external program (via system() ) and fitting a nonlinear expression to the result; the loop iterating a parameter for the external calculation.

It would be swell if I could run something like a progress bar that tells how many cycles done and still to go. Even better if I could get at the value of a certain variable that indicates progress of the whole calculation (which is an optimization problem...