Maple computer algebra system

Maple is a general-purpose commercial computer algebra system. 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 10.

Introduction

Maple is an interpreted, dynamically typed programming language. As is usual with computer algebra systems, symbolic expressions are stored in memory as directed acyclic graphs. This language is supported by the mathematical editor Scientific Notebook by MacKichan Software.

Since Maple 6 the language has permitted variables of lexical scope.

Example Maple code

The following code computes an exact solution to the linear ordinary differential equation

\frac{d^2y}{dx^2}(x) - 3 y(x) = x

subject to initial conditions:

y(0) = 0 ,\quad \left. \frac{dy}{dx} \right|_{y=0} = 2

dsolve( {diff(y(x),x,x) - 3*y(x) = x, y(0)=0, D(y)(0)=2}, y(x) );

Past releases

Maple 10: May 10, 2005
Maple 9.5: April 15, 2004
Maple 9: June 30, 2003
Maple 8: April 16, 2002
Maple 7: July 1, 2001
Maple 6: December 6, 1999
Maple V R5: November 1, 1997
Maple V R4: January, 1996
Maple V R3: March 15, 1994
Maple V R2: November 1992
Maple V: August, 1990
Maple 4.3: March, 1989
Maple 4.2: December, 1987
Maple 4.1: May, 1987
Maple 4.0: April, 1986
Maple 3.3: March, 1985 (first publicly available version)
Maple 3.2: April, 1984
Maple 3.1: October, 1983
Maple 3.0: May, 1983
Maple 2.2: December, 1982
Maple 2.15: August, 1982
Maple 2.1: June, 1982
Maple 2.0: May, 1982
Maple 1.1: January, 1982
Maple 1.0: January, 1982

Since 1994, MathCad has included a Maple-derived algebra engine (MKM, aka Mathsoft Kernel Maple).

Versions available

Maplesoft sells both student and professional editions of Maple, with a substantial difference in price (US$139 compared to US$1,995.00, respectively).

Recent student editions (from version 6 onwards) have not placed computational limitations but rather come with less printed documentation. This is similar to the difference between Mathematica's student and professional editions.

In releases prior to version 6, the student edition has had the following computational limitations:

A maximum of 100 floating point digits for computations and display.
A maximum size of 8000 (in machine words or objects contained) for any algebraic object.
A maximum of 3 dimensions for arrays.

External links

Maplesoft, division of Waterloo Maple, Inc. home website

Domain-specific programming languages | Computer algebra systems | Functional languages | IRIX software | Numerical programming languages

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Introduction

Example Maple code

Past releases

Versions available

See also

External links