This is a long shot, but I think Maplesoft should open up its bug database and allow MaplePrimes users to vote up or down on bugs, reddit style. This would provide direct feedback about which bugs really affect people. Behind the scenes you could cross-reference the votes with account data to get all kinds of useful information: like what bugs disproportionally affect new users, or what bugs annoy experienced Maple users the most, etc. This would allow you to focus attention...

I am pleased (and terrified) to announce the first public release of a Maple library for high performance sparse polynomial arithmetic. This C library and Maple interface is under development at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. We are releasing this interim version so that Maple enthusiasts and researchers can try it. Maple 11 is required.

"I've seen this element before..." Often we are faced with the problem of building up sets incrementally, by removing pieces one at a time from a larger whole. The bottlenecks in this case are usually: 1) adding a small set X to a large set S (copies S and X, making this ~O(|S|+|X|)) 2) removing elements of the large set S from the small set X (binary search: |X|*log(|S|)) A classic example of this is a breadth-first-search. We start at one vertex of a graph and in each iteration we add the set of new neighbors X to the set of vertices S that have already been found. We can make this more useful by making the program return the sets of new neighbors found in each iteration, that is, the sets of vertices that are distance 1, 2, 3, etc. from the initial vertex.

When working with large sparse linear systems you often want to look at their non-zero structure, however Maple's existing tools are all designed for dense matrices. I wrote a little tool to produce images like this in reasonable time. You can download the code here, and the rest of this post is a quick tutorial on how to use the included command. Maple 11 is required.

This is not so much a suggestion (I'm not sure if you should change it) but edited blog posts are booted off the front page. I edit sentence missing words and poor grammar and now it gone :)