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. It is marketed as "the essential productivity tool for every technical professional." The current version is Maple 9.5.

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.

Since Maple 6 the language has permitted lexically-scoped variables.

Example Maple code

The following code computes an exact solution to the linear ordinary differential equation subject to initial conditions:

dsolve( {diff(y(x),x,x) - 3*y(x) = x, y(0)=1, D(y)(0)=2}, y(x) );

Past releases

• 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: ??.
• Maple V R3: March 15, 1994.
• Maple V R2: 1992
• Maple V: 1991
• Maple 4.3: 1990
• Maple 4.2: ??
• Maple 4.1: ??
• Maple 4.0: 1985
• Maple 3.3: 1985 (first publicly available version)
• Maple 3.2: ??
• Maple 3.1: ??
• Maple 3.0: ??
• Maple 2.2: ??
• Maple 2.1: ??
• Maple 2.0: ??
• Maple 1.1: ??
• Maple 1.0: December, 1979

Versions available

Maplesoft sells both student and professional editions of Maple, with a substantial difference in price (e.g., US$99 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 in 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.

See also

• Axiom
• Mathematica from Wolfram Research (proprietary)
• GNU Maxima (GPL).
• EigenMath (freeware).

External link

• Maplesoft Website