Maple is a computer program capable of performing a wide variety of
mathematical operations. It originated in the early 1980s as a computer
algebra system, but today this description doesn’t really do it justice.
Maple has facilities for algebra, calculus, linear algebra, graphics (twoand
three-dimensional plots, and animations), numerical calculations
to arbitrary precision, and many other things besides. It is widely used
in universities across the world, and is particularly useful for tasks
that are tedious and error-prone when performed by humans, such as
manipulating complicated series expansions and solving large sets of
simultaneous equations. Used correctly, Maple can save time and quickly
solve problems that would otherwise be intractable. Used incorrectly, it
can lead to frustration, and the destruction of expensive IT equipment.
At the time of writing, the current version is Maple 2016. Versions
before Maple 2015 were numbered starting from 1; the last of these
was Maple 18. New features introduced in each version from Maple 4.0
onwards can be viewed using the help system (see Section 2.2). For the
most part, recent changes have been relatively minor, at least as far as
the material in this book is concerned. Consequently, all of the examples
work with both Maple 2015 and Maple 2016. In fact, most will work
in older versions as well, though naturally the number of exceptions
increases the further back one goes. Two substantial new features are
the dataplot command, discussed in Section 6.6, and the new rules
concerning terminating characters, described in Appendix B (see also
Section 2.3). Both of these were introduced in Maple 2015.
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