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Evangelos Georgiadis of MIT and Doron Zeilberger of Rutgers, along with Zeiberger's computer Shalosh B. Ekhad, have written a paper entitled, "How to Gamble If You're In a Hurry," in which they propose new ways of studying gambling from a mathematical perspective. They criticize previous scholarship following the Kolmogorov measure-theoretic paradigm, including Kelly (1956), Breiman (1961), and Dubins and Savage (1976), on the grounds that the mechanisms they provide for winning do not take into account real-life constraints such as the finite divisibility of money, the finite duration of the game, the finite resources of the opponents, and the possibility of uneven payoff in the game. Rather than proposing a single strategy that provides an optimal outcome to an unrealistic scenario, Georgiadis and Zeilberger provide a Maple package that calculates the best strategy given a set of real-world criteria, including the probability of winning a game, the amount of money you have, and the time within which you must complete your gambling. The paper thus represents a movement from using mathematics to derive single solutions to highly abstract problems to using algorithms that can generate optimal solutions for more concrete problems. Also, Zeiberger advances an attempt at cuteness by putting condescending words about humanity in his computer's mouth, the irony of which is heightened by the realization that Shalosh B. Ekhad is nothing more than Zeiberger's ventriloquist dummy.

Matlab, not Maple. Clearly it's time for a coffee.

He is talking about This maple

click here first.

Mathematica 7 has launched, as noted in Stephen Wolfram's blog post. Among the new features are huge equation typesetting, transcendental roots, and discrete calculus. Looking back at the version 6 discussion, it's perhaps inevitable that comparisons will be made to CAR, CGsuite, GAP, Geogebra, Geometer's Sketchpad, Geometry Expressions, Geonext, LaTeX, Magma, Maple, Matlab, nauty, noneuclid, Pari, Sage, or SeifertView. In other news, the Wolfram Demonstrations project now has over 4000 interactive math demos.

By Maplesoft.

Nothing else comes close in the combination of brilliant and awful software development.

The underlying engine is great (it does symbolic algebra). The GUI is awful. It was awful in version 9. Then they revised it in version 10 (or 11, or something) and it's still awful, just in new ways. Backspace arbitrarily stops working. Mouse-select highlights random areas of the worksheet that bear no relation to where you clicked the mouse. The fancy new formatted maths in version 10 doesn't have a linear key-stroke model behind it, so backspace never works. Every new version seems to break both forwards and backwards compatibility.

Yes, I know that I should be using SAGE.

FrostWire is a Peer to Peer (P2P) information sharing client for the Gnutella network.

Aqua Data Studio is a database query tool and administration tool that allows developers to easily create, edit, and execute SQL scripts, as well as browse and visually modify database structures.

Maple is a leading Computer Algebra System

Columba is a very nice email client

Rio Music Manager is and iTunes like app that comes bundled with every Rio mp3 player (can be downloaded for free too)

MagicDraw is a very impressive UML modeler.

I was going to say "duh, of course not, 0^0 is undefined, everyone knows that", since that's what I remember being taught all through school and university. However, a Google search tells me apparently it's not necessarily black or white. So I guess you have to go with what's useful for you. Anyway, it seems not even all software agrees; for example, both the built-in Windows calculator and Maple 8 say it's 1, but the PowerToys PowerCalc shows an error.

How about a real apples to apples comparison. Maple switched to java for their gui frontend (for who the hell knows what reason) and ships their old classic gui frontend (probably written in C++) with it. Not only is the java one wayyyy slow but it uses a shitload of ram.

I am 39 years old and am pleasantly amused at all this talk about laptops. I didn't grow up with laptops, so perhaps I am an "old fogey" about this, but I find it interesting that we are talking about things for children that I as an adult can't justify buying.

I'm 23 now (graduated and in a real job) and I feel like an "old fogey" comapred to most of the kids nowadays. I've had plenty of reasons to buy a laptop. Primarly being that I don't have to lug a desktop around and can get work done on the business trips. For back in school, I used it so I could get out of my room (where my main desktop was a distraction [ie games/internet/slashdot/roommate]) and go to someplace else with fewer distractions (dining hall, even if a band was playing).

But the main reason is cost. A decent laptop is $2000 or so (and that includes the MS tax),

I'm buying a pretty decent laptop this week that costs $1400, decent as in, 512MB ram, 40GB HD, 1.6 Pentium M, 64MB dedicated video NVIDIA Card, laptop is supposed to be good enough to play Doom 3 on. 2k+ is way over for that. That said, what a student would need (as in word processing, basic games and surfing_ could pretty much be accomplished by a sub $600 laptop I saw the other day, or a $250 computer from HP.

If the laptop is stolen or lost, who has to pay?

Either the school or the insurance agency. Depends on what is going on

I'm sure there are parents who are worried that their son/daughter is walking around with a device almost as expensive as a car that they did not have to pay for

Since when did a $500 laptop (which is about all that they need here) become as valuable as a $15,000 car? (and that is a cheap car).

How can students use this? The best use is campus wireless access (BTW, I live in Houston, where wifi access royally sucks). Notetaking perhaps, but that's an expensive fancy pencil there. I can imagine cases where it would be easy to swap files inside the classroom, where you can work outside or in small groups.

Writing up their papers. Most teachers I have known have required papers to be typed. This includes biology, chemistry and physics along with english. Second, handouts. Some handouts are easier to give out as a file rather than as printouts (where you lose color) or for handing out a copy of a presentation (where you lose color and any images presented [note, not all images show up well on printouts either]).

Educationally, let's look at the classroom benefits. Chat--BFD, unless you are communicating with the astronauts doing research--well, sure, but school machines could fulfill this purpose just as well transporting schoolwork to/from school: hey, what about yahoo My Briefcase (20$ a year)? what about USB flash keychains?

See above about a few things. Typing papers, getting the notes, come math courses require a program called Maple, but that is calculus and above. I highly doubt they will be doing any chatting or research while in class. That said, sometimes it has been easier to bring my own laptop and present it that way than to use the teachers computer, especially when I don't know for sure if they have some of the programs I do (and sometimes for when I have a 40MB+ presentation to give).

Then there are some of the more specialized courses such as programming and CAD. Along with other various programs that you can get for classwork today. Think about some of the helper applications you can get to help with Chemistry, physics and biology. (Hint, refernce programs are easier to use than a reference book sometimes).

the tendency to teach concepts in terms of MS Office and Adobe products. From what I hear, quite a number of junior high students give Powerpoint presentations in their class.That is bad. We are simply creating MS customers (and I'll be reluctant to endorse any new technology unless the school district s

actually, ever heard of Maple? UWaterloo started it.

actually, ever heard of Maple? UWaterloo started it.

That project should probably consider a name change in order to avoid getting trademark problems due to this software.

For reference, Maple is a mathematics tool with a console like interface.

I agree, a demonstration of Maple would be nice, but you should note that the program is commercial and is also available under Windows.

There might not be such a great difference in functionality between Mathematic/Maple and Matlab, if you have the symbolic math toolbox (although the UI is totally different ...).

There are three major pieces of symbolic software: Maple, Mathematica, and GiNaC.

Maple is great, especially for Calculus students. I consider Mathematica to be evil since they apparently bought out the major players in Reduce (an older symbolic math system still used in Russia), tried to buy out a major GiNaC developer, and send him threats when he refused. They're not as successful as Microsoft, but they might be giving MS's evilness some competition.

GiNaC is a GPL'd library for symbolic computation. You interface with it using C++. It's particulary good for physics, but if you use it, you can make it do what you need it to do....

The symbolic processing in Octave [-Forge] uses GiNaC.

Disclaimer: I work for maple, as a developer but not in R&D. I speak from my knowledge of this company but I'm sure the others have similar situations.

The problem with OSS for something like a mathematics package (especially a package with symbolics) is they contain IP obtained with research partnerships with institutions. You won't find a OSS solution that competes with any of the big 3 (Maple, Matlab and Mathematica) because the the algorithms for symbolics and so forth are just too complex and important as IP to the companies.

All 3 of the packages I believe/know have much reduced student pricing ($100 USD for a downloadable on Mac, Linux or Win) and many of the schools in North America either have a partnership or you can obtain the software directly from your department. Also many of the calculus texts include 4 or 8 month trial versions.

I know this doesn't help much and it is unfortunate that you can't obtain OSS alternatives for software that has a educational purpose, but on the otherside with out the 1000's of freshman in Calc101 I wouldn't have a salary.

While people have suggested maple and mathematica they are both fairly expensive (even for students). magma is another paid alternative.

mupad is a decent alternative, that, while not open source, is free to download.

To comment on the many pencil+paper posts, I would like to add that a whiteboard is an essential mathematical tool. Besides ease of erasure, they allow for much more collaboration than a pencil and paper.

You say that you work for a large financial company. You might check with the company's research group: they likely already use one of Maple/Mathematica/Matlab; so you could potentially be best off using what they use.

1. Excel is an extremely poor tool for doing anything other than basic graphs and calculations. For engineering purposes, it's near useless.

Also, contrary to some of the comments , Maple beats out everything else--including specialized programs--in some areas, e.g. symbolic solutions of ODEs. (It's true, though, that for say group theory, specialized programs are better.)

Check this out. Now, flame away, because it is very expensive.

If it's in the small print, I'm afraid the case against Apple isn't going to hold any water.

If for some strange reason the case does succeed, this may mean big trouble for many other statements of file size or disk capacity, whether in documents or in size indications by software apps like file managers, many of which use 1 GB == 1,024 MB.

Oddly enough, the mathematical software Maple V has known about the prefixes "kibi" and "gibi" for as long as I can remember (check the "Unit Prefixes" help topic).

I for one am a supporter of strict SI unit prefix compliance, which will end the confusion.

This is yet another reason that LaTeX is Good.

If you're doing anything at all with computer algebra (rather common in applied math and engineering science anyway) you'll find you can get maple or mathematica to output your equations at any stage of processing in TeX. They even have little TeX-rendering front ends now.

This is really really nifty, because it means that you can play with the algebraic form of an equation (or a whole table of related equations) and see what form of the same equation typesets the most clearly and readably -- with a far lower probability of making typographic errors!

I did a lot of the equations for my thesis like this, in the late 80's -- using cut-and-paste between different virtual terminals under X windows to get the TeX output from command-line maple and mathematica into my vi session where I was writing my thesis--in plain TeX.

Great reproducibility and easier to keep stuff organised too. It means you can save the maple or mathematica workbook in the same directory as that section of your thesis (and the bibtex file associated with it, and the fortran/C source you also had maple/mathematic spit out to test numerical approaches to solving the same problem).

Someone mentioned FrameMaker -- that was originally just a SunWindows WYSIWYG front-end to TeX. A long long time ago. It was too expensive, and there were several open source alternatives to preview your DVI output, some of which survive to this day.

If you play music with other people lilypond makes the most beautifully typeset music I've ever seen -- in LaTeX --and automates the transcription process for you as well. From the command line. Which means you can set it up as a web service for your muso buddies, who might be blowing a B-flat instrument, while you keep the master transcription in C for the piano. While there are lots of pointy-clicky windows apps that will do this, the typesetting quality is not nearly as good, and because they require someone pointing and clicking, it's much harder to use them as processing back ends to some other thing you might want to do. e.g. a transcription service that you and your friends need in order to play stuff together. But a way to get rehearsal copies to them quickly without a lot of fiddling around in Windows.

Microsoft

Nowhere did I mention Microsoft. By "proprietary Linux applications" I was primarily referring to the Waterloo Maple algebra package site-licensed by some universities. There is a Windows version and a Linux/x86 version but no Mac OS X version, Darwin+X11 version, or Linux PPC version.

Get yer Mathematica for Linux right here..

or if you prefer Matlab for Linux...

or perhaps Maple for Linux?

(I haven't used any of these on Linux; I've used Matlab on a Sun back in the days of fvwm2 so I'm *guessing* it will run under more modern window managers without having to mess with anything..)

I would suggest doing some more research about Matlab and Mathematica (as well as Maple).

Matlab is mostly used for creation of and use of complex algorithms, DSP simulations, and other "heavy math" tasks. It's a great swiss army knife and integrates easily with most C compilers for compiled-performance (rather than interpreted). One of the many "modules" included with Matlab is a symbolic math package based on the Maple engine (see below).

Mathematica and Maple are little more than symbolic math packages. (Don't get me wrong, they can do A LOT, but neither comes close to the full Matlab package). Each has its pros and cons, but either will do quite well for any math undergrad university student and most grad students. The merits of Mathematica vs Maple are often heavily debated on the usenet and in other forums.

Matlab, Mathematica, and Maple are all very powerful packages... they can do **WAY** more than any of the lame "MathCAD" type apps you probably used in high school.

All three are available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and most flavors of Unix (Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, Tru64). Each has a rather simple interface and "looks" like a native application with the exception of the Linux/Unix version of Matlab -- it's a quick port from Windows with some lame crossplatform toolkit. Its GUI widgets look as though they're straight out of Windows. This cannot be changed without a lot of hackery. Despite the ugly interface, I would recommend Matlab for students... the student price is about the same as that of Mathematica or Maple, yet includes so much more (plus all of the symbolic math features straight from Maple 8).

If you don't need (or don't want) all that Matlab offers, Maple may do the trick for you. I used Maple 6 for years and only recently moved to Matlab (for compatibility reasons). Maple, even the current Maple 8, is a clean lightweight application. It's easy on the disk and ram, and even easier on the CPU. And, (IMHO), it does just as much as Mathematica would for me.

Also, all three have a full-featured command line interface alternative to their GUIs. Learning how to key in equations without the mouse and tool palettes will help you in the long run -- you'll be able to enter data much faster. Brushing up on TeX and/or MathML will also prove helpful.

These days, my workstation runs little more than Matlab, LyX, and sometimes Framemaker.

I don't know what the 'other stuff' is. but Java, Matlab, and Maple are all available for Linux.

What about the Blackberry, which is produced by the successful startup Research in Motion (RIM)?

FYI, Maple and Blackberry were both developed by Waterloo students. In fact, though most of you don't realize it, Waterloo students have helped develop some of the greatest technology on the market. Those of you who claim that there are few famous Waterloo graduates are right; while Waterloo graduates are too modest to talk about their major achievements, others are willing to brag about accomplishments of lesser value.

I'd always wondered how long it would be before the companies that produce software like Mathematica and Maple would port their software to PDAs. When I went to college at Rose-Hulman IT we were all issued notebooks which ran Maple and CAD software. We used Maple in all of our Calc classes and were able to use it on tests once we proved our ability to do that particular type of problem by hand first. The CAD software could have easily been on higher power workstations. If Maple had been on our PDAs it would have lowered the cost of going to the college by a few thousand dollars (high end notebooks were really expensive back in '95, and sometimes still are)

The main problem is that PDAs were nearly non-existant at that time, but today I can see PDAs like the iPaq doing a grand job of running some of this higher end math software.

Of course cheating would run pretty rampant with wireless transmitting of email and text, not to mention the ability to store files with crib sheets on them. I'm still not sure how our profs back in the day thought they were ensuring that we didn't cheat on our calc exams back then. I think it was more of a matter of honor than anything.

Are the U Waterloo mathies releasing a distro optimized for Maple? Why else would there be a Pink Tie Linux?

Sure it's a useful piece of software. But it's an absolute pain in the ass, Wolfram is a paranoid bastard, and it's not worth half the price they ask for it. For my professional work, I choose Maple. Go away Wolfram and annoy someone else. I don't want to talk to you after I have legally purchased your product. It's NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!

Remember dongles? The things you put on your serial port to keep you running Autocad on only one machine? Mathematica is one big software dongle.

--Bob

I went to Lehigh University and we had Maple V available on our on campus network...it's an extremely powerful mathematics application...

it's not really a programming language, but it does allow you the ability to create variables, your own functions, etc...by far the most powerful featues are it's graphing capabilities and it's ability to find integrals and derivatives of equations that you'd never dream of trying to solve by paper and pencil...

the only downsides are it takes a while to get used to (the manual is huge!), and the program itself is a bit of a memory hog...other then that it's great...

The University of Waterloo has a program called Maple. It's fairly easy to pick up, available for Windows, UNIX, Linux and Macs, not horribly expensive, and very powerful. There's also piles of add-on packages created by other mathematicians.

If you're looking for something on the numerical analysis end, try Octave. It's like MatLab but free.

Does that make Maple a circumvention device?

The hardware exists...a 11" TFT LCD screen, Wacom-like pen input overlaid on top. It needs to have a high resolution (both the screen and input) for accurate handwriting recognition. Wouldn't need a very fast processor. Could sync to my computer over USB.

As a theoretical physicist, I desparately want something like this. I'm a massive computer junkie, but currently, the highest-tech way I can do calculations is pencil and paper... On the math side, recognizing mathematical notation will be very hard, and would require a lot of work in user interfaces. In the short term, just recording the user's penstrokes and saving it as a vector graphic would be sufficent. In the long term, interface it to a basic Computer Algebra System. i.e. something that will check all those factors of two, negative signs, etc. In the very long term, have the interface do most of what I do by hand. For instance, apply a mathematical identity to an equation, and copy the new equation to the next line. Allow me to manipulate individual terms. Most of all, allow me to define new notations. Each sub-field of math, physics, chemistry, and engineering uses its own notation, and a rule-system should exist to check the validity of the input in the notation that is familiar to the user.

Right now I use pencil and paper, some Maple, and computer programs to numerically evaluate things. Maple's interface is not well suited to a pen-based manipulation system. (don't mention Mathematica, I will not professionally support their absurd pricing and draconian licensing policies) I have high hopes that a viable open-source Computer Algebra System will evolve out of the existing Octave or GiNaC.

*Sigh* if any of you entreprenuring business types are listening, WE WANT TABLETS AND WE WANT THEM YESTERDAY . And not those stupid web-browser tablets. sheesh.

--Bob

I see a lot of overlapping work with Symbolic Computation Group's Maple.

I worked on Maple many years ago, and it's more like a programming language to me than a symbolic representation of mathematics. Why bother doing the same thing over again with less completeness?

To be honest, Maple is like hell to me(probably I don't like programming mathematics), but I just don't want to see people create another hell.

It's a Coke® and Pepsi® issue. Some fellas like Mathematica; others (myself included) like Waterloo Maple. It depends on what your school pushes.

All I have to do is open the equation editor and edit like I would if I was using a commcercial CAS like Maple. (yerricde added this link)

Same on the TI-89; you can set up a subroutine (with local variables) that returns a value. At my school, we jokingly refer to the 89 as "pocket Maple," referring to the copy of Waterloo Maple V that is included with our college's distribution of Windows 98, which comes preinstalled on the laptop we all get. (I'm going off on a big tan() .)

the hp48 ... gives you more options than a simplified "Ti Basic" and an ASM command.

If you have a "run arbitrary binary" command and you have a computer and link cable, you have C. There are free (beer and speech) C compilers for m68k, and m68000 is inside the 89 uses.

it's certainly more rewarding when you reach a much higher summit than you could've on a TI calculator.

On the 89, there are customized OSes that overlay onto the TI environment; one example is DoorsOS. Heck, if the d*rn thing had more RAM (it has 512K), you could make Linux for it.

unlike the TI, which uses both proprietary link hardware and protocols

That have been cracked long ago. The TI-83 was 0wn3d before I even learned about it 2 1/2 years ago. The LPT connector schematics for the TI-8x have been published several places on the web. Look at TIcalc.org for more info.