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Maple is a general-purpose commercial mathematics software package. It was first developed in 1981 by the Symbolic Computation Group at the University Of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario , Canada . Since 1988, it has been developed and sold commercially by Waterloo Maple Inc. (also known as '''Maplesoft'''), a Canadian company also based in Waterloo, Ontario. The current version is Maple 11 which was released in February 2007. INTRODUCTION Maple combines a Programming Language with an Interface that allows users to enter mathematics in traditional mathematical notation. Most of the mathematical functionality of Maple is written in the Maple language, which is Interpreted by the Maple Kernel . The Maple kernel is written in C . The Maple programming language is an Interpreted , Dynamically Typed programming language. As is usual with Computer Algebra System s, symbolic expressions are stored in memory as Directed Acyclic Graph s. Since Maple 6 the language has permitted variables of lexical Scope . HISTORY The first concept of Maple arose from a meeting in November 1980 at the University Of Waterloo . Researchers at the university wished to purchase a computer powerful enough to run Macsyma . Instead, it was decided that they would develop their own computer algebra system that would be able to run on more reasonably priced computers. Thus, the project began with the goal of creating a symbolic algebra system accessible to researchers and students. The initial development of Maple proceeded very quickly, with the first limited version appearing in December 1980. Researchers tried and discarded many different ideas creating a continually evolving system. Maple was demonstrated first at conferences beginning in 1982. By the end of 1983, over 50 universities had copies of Maple installed on their machines. Due to the large number of support and licensing requests, in 1984, the research group arranged with WATCOM Products Inc to license and distribute Maple. In 1988, due to the increasing requests for support, ; the Ontario Research Centre for Computer Algebra at the University Of Western Ontario ; and labs at other universities worldwide. In 1989 the first graphical user interface for Maple was developed and included with version 4.3 for the Macintosh. Prior versions of Maple included only a command line interface with two dimensional output. X11 and Windows versions of the new interface followed in 1990 with Maple V. In 2003 the current "standard" interface was introduced with Maple 9. This interface is primarily written in Java , however portions, such as the rules for typesetting mathematical formulae, are written in the Maple language. The new interface is widely derided for being slow, and for this reason Maplesoft continues to include the previous "classic" interface while working to improve the performance and features of the new interface. In 2005 Maple 10 introduced a new "document mode", as part of the standard interface. The main feature of this mode is that math is entered using two dimensional input, appearing similar to a formula in a book. ORIGIN OF THE NAME There is a common belief that the name, Maple, is an acronym. In fact, the name is a reference to Maple’s Canadian Heritage . EXAMPLE MAPLE CODE Find . int(cos(x/a), x); Answer: Calculate the root of the equation starting at the point . evalf(RootOf(exp(x)=x^2+2,x,-1)); Answer: |
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