Dear Maple Community,

It has been a year since the passing of Stefan Vorkoetter, who started contributing to the Maple project in the 80s and was a long term member of our development team. 

Here are a few recently published articles about Stefan, that I'd like to share with you:

https://mapletransactions.org/index.php/maple/article/view/18269
https://mapletransactions.org/index.php/maple/article/view/18681

we shall not forget

Over the past weeks, we have spoken with many of our academic customers throughout the world, many of whom have decided to continue their academic years online. As you can imagine, this is a considerable challenge for instructors and students alike. Academia has quickly had to pivot to virtual classrooms, online testing and other collaborative technologies, while at the same time dealing with the stress and uncertainty that has resulted from this crisis.

We have been working with our customers to help them through this time in a variety of ways, but we know that there are still classes and students out there who are having trouble getting all the resources they need to complete their school year. So starting today, Maple Student Edition is being made free for every student, anywhere in the world, until the end of June. It is our hope that this action will remove a barrier for instructors to complete their Maple-led math instruction, and will help make things a bit more simple for everyone.

If you are a student, you can get your free copy of Maple here.

In addition, many of you have asked us about the best way to work on your engineering projects from home and/or teaching and learning remotely during this global crisis. We have put together resources for both that you can use as a starting point, and I invite you to contact us if you have any questions, or are dealing with challenges of your own. We are here to support you, and will be very flexible as we work together through these uncertain times.

I wish you all the best,

Laurent
President & CEO

As you saw in the Maple 2015 What’s New, the MapleCloud is now online at maplecloud.maplesoft.com.  In addition to accessing MapleCloud content from within Maple, you can now use a web browser to view and interact with MapleCloud documents. The new online MapleCloud is based on HTML5 and works across a broad range of browsers. No plugins. No Java.

The MapleCloud was first introduced about five years ago, in Maple 14, and has allowed Maple users around the globe to share worksheets and Math Apps with fellow users. The Maple Cloud allows you to create groups in order to share content with specific people, as well as sharing them publicly.  Today we count over 1400 such groups that have been created for a class, a project or a workgroup, hosting tens of thousands of Maple worksheets, with thousands of worksheets being up- and down-loaded every month. Feedback has been tremendous, and clearly, this feature has hit a nerve with our user community and has attracted a strong following.

A common use case is to set up a MapleCloud group for a class in order to exchange Maple material among students and instructors. Some teachers are using this as the primary mechanism for submitting and marking assignments. Just as common is to use the MapleCloud as a convenient way to exchange and review documents while working on a joint project. Many users also use the Cloud to store their own documents in a private online space so that they can access them from multiple computers and locations. Wherever they have access to Maple, they also have access to all their Maple documents.

Then, there are the public groups in the MapleCloud, where users around the world freely share applications and examples; it’s a treasure trove of material covering all sorts of topics from calculus to fractals.

Now online, the MapleCloud continues to be a great repository for Maple content, but in addition, there are also some new aspects. For starters, it is really easy to share a Maple worksheet or Math App with someone else by simply giving them a URL. Click on it and the Maple worksheet opens in your web browser and all interactive components and plots are live - you can change parameters, calculate new results and update plots. For example, you can try out a Password Security tool or explore the Vertex of a Parabola. Maple is not required for consuming content in this way. But if you do have Maple, another click downloads the document to your local copy of Maple, where you can modify and extend it.

The online MapleCloud is a great way to manage your documents and share Maple content with students and colleagues.  This, of course, is only one more step towards making all of our technology available online and you will see more unfold over the course of this year!

Math powers the world. From tracking the spread of an epidemic to designing a new rocket engine, mathematical equations allow us to understand a challenge and formulate an approach to solving it. Everywhere around us, math is ubiquitous; an equation determines how your thermostat controls your home furnace; a mathematical algorithm is used to encode the signal from your cell phone. More than ever, we rely on mathematics to make our lives better. And continually, our mathematical techniques get more refined as we solve more and more complex problems.

This is one of my favorite events of the year. When we launch a new release of Maple, I get to see the work of so many talented individuals at Maplesoft come together in a form that I am sure will delight, and maybe even surprise you.

We are holding true to our principles with Maple 18. Hundreds of new mathematical algorithms further strengthen a computational engine that will help you tackle your toughest challenges. The user interface experience continues to become smarter, allowing you to focus on getting results without fighting with syntax. Connectivity options are again becoming richer.

A personal favorite of mine is the newly enhanced Explore functionality, which allows you to, with a couple of clicks, go from a mathematical expression to an interactive Math App. Math Apps allow you to explore the parameter space of the expression, gain insight into its behavior and even, in conjunction with Maple T.A., produce a gradeable Möbius App that allows you to assess a student’s interaction with the app and hence their understanding of the underlying concepts. The expanded Explore functionality is just part of a collection of advancements in Maple 18 that support The Möbius Project.

Overall, the new features of Maple 18 are quite numerous and I won’t try to list them all here. However, I do want to mention a few areas that have received special attention:

• Statistics: Maple 18 includes lots of enhancements to statistics computations and visualization, such as new time series functionality that allows you to find patterns, make forecasts, and visualize time-based data. For the classroom, a new Student Statistics package, together with a range of bundled Math Apps, provide a simplified and interactive environment for instructors and students alike.
  
  
• Physics: This package for representing and computing with concepts from general relativity to quantum mechanics continues to grow by leaps and bounds, with over 500 enhancements just in this release alone. We are convinced that this is the best computational environment available for researchers in this area.
  
  
• Engineering: Key enhancements for control analysis, signal processing, and code generation to Python and Perl are just a few of the new features that engineers will note and appreciate. There’s even import/export for STL graphics files, which, amongst other things, means you can now print out your favorite Maple plots on a 3-D printer!

I think you will agree that Maple 18 exemplifies all the effort and attention that we have put into it.  And there’s more to come - this release is just the start of a stream of product announcements that you can expect from us in the coming months. Stay tuned!