Maple 11 Unveiled

By DE Editors

Maplesoft (Waterloo, ONT) has announced Maple 11, the company’s flagship product for complex mathematical problems and technical documentation creation. Maple 11, described as “a major release,” offers enhancements to its smart document interface, computation engine, and connectivity capabilities the sum of which provides you the necessary technologies to reduce error and increase analytical productivity, says Maplesoft. Additionally, Maple 11 offers a new, sneak preview of a handwriting recognition feature lets you try out a developing technology for machine understanding of handwritten mathematics.

   
Maple 11 combines the company’s highly regarded mathematical computation engine with a user-interface that, says Maplesoft, minimizes the learning curve common with other similar software because it is so intuitive. Buttressing this assertion, the company cites the software’s smart document environment, which provides self-documenting context menus that automatically create a reusable record of your calculations as you execute them. This record provides a description of the steps that includes information about variables used in operations, not just the operation itself, and the text is modifiable and can contain 2D math.

Maple 11’s enhanced plotting capabilities include the ability to use natural math notation in titles, legends, labels, and tick marks; support for international characters; and plot annotation capabilities such as sketching, adding text and math, and drawing lines, shapes and arrows using new drawing canvas tools.

New point-and-click task assistants include Backsolver, Special Functions, and Scientific Constants. The Back-Solving assistant automatically generates a back-solver for your equation, allowing you to solve for any variable in your formula instantly, given the values of the other parameters. The Special Functions assistant provides access to the properties of more than 200 special functions, including the Bessel, Hypergeometric, Mathieu, Heun, and Legendre families of functions. The Scientific Constants assistant offers a database of scientific constants, including more than 20,000 values of physical constants and properties of chemical elements.

Other features of Maple 11 include the ability to turn documents into an instant slide show; annotation capabilities; inter-document equation references that allow you to work on calculations with equations from other documents; and.

Maple 11 offers improvements to its differential equation and differential algebraic equation solvers, including new methods and enhanced support for large systems. Miscellaneous features in new specialty packages for graph theory, physics, and differential geometry; better MATLAB connectivity; numeric integration and summation; vector calculus; and the ability to turn documents into an instant slide-show; annotation capabilities. Maple 11 also sees multi-core processor support.

Maple 11 ships in March. Professional licenses are for $1895 (US), which includes the Maple Toolbox for MATLAB, MapleNet, and a one-year subscription to the Maplesoft Elite Maintenance Program. Purchases or upgrades between now and March will receive Maple 10, which will be upgraded to Maple 11 in March automatically. Academic, upgrade, and volume discounts are available. For more information, click here.

Sources: Press briefing and materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.