Preface - Maple Help

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Preface

Technical computation forms the heart of problem solving in mathematics, engineering, and science. To help you, Maple™ offers a vast repository of mathematical algorithms covering a wide range of applications.

At the core of Maple, the symbolic computation engine is second to none in terms of scalability and performance. Indeed, symbolics was the core focus when Maple was first conceived at the University of Waterloo in 1980 and to this day Maple continues to be the benchmark software for symbolic computing.

Together with a large repository of numeric functionality, including industry-standard libraries such as the Intel® Math Kernel Library (MKL), Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software (ATLAS), and the C Linear Algebra PACKage (CLAPACK), as well as a broad selection of routines from the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG® ) libraries, you can rely on Maple to support you a across many domains and applications. Using its unique hybrid technology, Maple integrates the symbolic and numeric worlds to solve diverse problems more efficiently and with higher accuracy.

The Maple user interface allows you to harness all this computational power by using context-sensitive menus, task templates, and interactive assistants. The first steps are intuitively easy to use and quickly lead you into the captivating, creative, and dynamic world of Maple.

As you get more proficient, you will want to explore more deeply and directly access all of the computational power available to you. You can accomplish this through the Maple programming language. Combining elements from procedural languages (such as Pascal), functional languages (such as Lisp) and object-oriented languages (such as Java™ ), Maple provides you with an exceptionally simple yet powerful language to write your own programs. High-level constructs such as map allow you to express in a single statement what would take ten lines of code in a language like C.

Maple allows you to quickly focus and reliably solve problems with easy access to over 5000 algorithms and functions developed over 30 years of cutting-edge research and development.

Maple's user community is now over two million people. Together we have built large collections of Maple worksheets and Maple programs, much of which is freely available on the web for you to reuse or learn from. The majority of the mathematical algorithms you find in Maple today are written in the Maple Programming Language. As a Maple user, you write programs using the same basic tools that the Maple developers themselves use. Moreover you can easily view most of the code in the Maple library and you can even extend the Maple system, tying your programs in with existing functionality.

This guide will lead you from your first steps in Maple programming to writing sophisticated routines and packages, allowing you to tackle problems in mathematics, engineering, and science effectively and efficiently. You will quickly progress towards proficiency in Maple programming, allowing you to harness the full power of Maple.

Have fun!

Audience

This guide provides information for users who are new to Maple programming, as well as experienced Maple programmers. Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with the following.

 • The Maple help system
 • How to use Maple interactively
 • The Maple User Manual

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