MAPLE

      

  Maple is a very powerful computer algebra system used by students, educators, mathematicians, statisticians, scientists, and engineers for doing numerical and symbolic computations. Maple is a software package for doing mathematics. Maple can perform both symbolic and numerical computations, and Maple can draw nice pictures.

          Maple is a tool to help you learn, discover, and do mathematics. Maple is a very versatile tool; it is used for teaching math courses all the way from high school algebra and trigonometry up to graduate level math, physics, and engineering courses. Maple is also used extensively for doing research in each of these fields. 

         These worksheets are a tool to help you learn and discover how to use Maple. Each worksheet contains explanations of Maple commands, examples of the use of the commands, and exercises that you are asked to do right in the worksheet. The best way to use these worksheets is to download one of them to your computer, use Maple to open the worksheet, and then "work your way through the worksheet". By this I mean, read the explanations, execute the Maple commands, look carefully at the output of each command and give that output some thought, do the exercises that are in the worksheets, and finally, and most importantly, play around with the content of the worksheet, modify some of the commands and re-execute them, use the help system to look up more information about the commands, enter your own commands into the worksheet, etc. In short, use all the interactive features of the Maple interface to explore Maple. This ability to play around with the content of each worksheet is what makes Maple, and other computer programs like it, a new way to learn mathematics. Maple worksheets are a kind of interactive textbook, something that we will all be seeing much more of in the near future.


What is MAPLE?

• Maple is a procedural programming language. It also includes a number of functional programming constructs. If you have written programs in Basic, Pascal, Algol, C, Lisp, or Fortran, you should be able to write numerical programs in Maple very quickly.
• Maple is not strongly typed like C and Pascal. No declarations are required. Maple is more like Basic and Lisp in this respect. However types exist. Type checking is done at run time and must be programmed explicitly.
• Maple is interactive and the programming language is interpreted. Maple is not suitable for running numerically intensive programs because of the interpreter overhead. Though it is suitable for high-precision numerical calculations and as a tool for generating numerical codes. 

 To learn how to use the maple programming, you can go to maple

Below are the function in four mathematics software:

SOFTWARE	FUNCTION
Mathematica	is the premier all-purpose mathematical software package. It integrates swift and accurate symbolic and numerical calculation, all-purpose graphics, and a powerful programming language. It has a sophisticated ``notebook interface'' which is great for documenting and displaying work.It can save individual graphics in any graphics format. Its functional programming language (as opposed to procedural) makes it possible to do complex programming using very short concise commands; it does, however,allow the use of basic procedural programming constructs like Do and For.
Matlab	Matlab combines efficient computation, visualization and programming for linear-algebraic technical work and other mathematical areas.It is widely used in the Engineering department.
Maple	Maple is powerful analytical and mathematical software which does the same sorts of things that Mathematica does, with similar high quality. Maple's programming language procedural -- like C or Fortran or Basic -- although it has a few functional programming constructs.
IDL	(Interactive Data Language) excels at processing real-world data, especially graphics, and has a reasonably simple syntax, especially for those familiar with Fortran or C.IDL makes it as easy as possible to read in data from files of numerous scientific data formats.IDL is very popular at NASA, universities and research facilities, and especially at C.U. where it was originally developed and is free (see site license).

Finally, don't be afraid to begin using Maple right away in any of your other math or science courses. After you do the first worksheet or two from this course, which shouldn't take more than a week, you will know enough about Maple to be able to use it to help you do calculations in many other courses. Maple also works well for producing lab reports in science courses since Maple can do calculations, plot data, graph functions, and typeset equations, all of which are useful for preparing lab reports (and many other kinds of homework assignments). If you want to use Maple for another course and you feel that you need some extra help or advice on using it, don't hesitate to ask me.