The Maple Computer Algebra System Michael Monagan 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, superscripts 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.