The Maple Computer Algebra System

Maple is a comprehensive general purpose computer algebra system. It is used primarily in education and scientific research in the sciences, in mathematics, and in engineering. Maple can do both symbolic and numerical calculations and has facilities for 2 and 3-dimensional graphical output. The newest version of Maple, Maple V Release 2, sports a new user interface that integrates these three facilities as well as text into a document called a worksheet. Worksheets are a nice medium for presenting and communicating results and teaching material. A new feature of Release 2 that makes worksheets especially appealing is that results computed by Maple are displayed in a high quality font with full support for math symbols, Greek characters, subscripts, etc. Maple is also a programming language. In fact almost all of the mathematical and graphical facilities are written in Maple and not in a systems implementation language like other computer algebra systems. These Maple programs reside on disk in the Maple library and are loaded on demand. The programming language supports procedural and functional programming. We will not give specific details of the programming language beyond this, even though this is perhaps a key part of the Maple system. Details and examples can be found in the two manuals [1] and [2] cited in the references. We wish to mention instead a bit of Maple history. The main design goal of Maple in 1980 was to design a language for implementing mathematical algorithms which was powerful and efficient enough so that almost all of the mathematical algorithms could be written in it, rather than in a systems implementation language like C or Lisp. Another main design objective was to minimize overall memory requirements so that larger problems could be solved, and Maple could run on smaller computers, and support many simultaneous users on time-shared systems. The outcome is a system consisting