Evolution of Maple

Maple is powerful, versatile, and efficient. But how did it get that way? It’s not just about adding more packages – over the years there have been key design decisions that have had a profound impact on what Maple can do and how it does it. In this talk, Dr. Laurent Bernardin, CEO and President of Maplesoft, will provide insight into some of these choices, the reasons behind them, and how they affect users of Maplesoft products today. Along the way, he’ll share his own memories of some of these turning points and the people who made them happen.

Dr. Laurent Bernardin is President and CEO of Maplesoft. He has been with Maplesoft for over 20 years and prior to his appointment to his current role, he held the positions of CTO and COO. Bernardin is a firm believer that mathematics matters. Under his leadership, Maple has grown from a research project in symbolic computing to a complete environment for mathematical calculations used by hundreds of thousands of engineers, scientists, researchers and students around the world.

Using Pokémon (or Your Favorite Video Game) as a Teaching Tool

How many Pikachus does it take to power a lightbulb? How many calories would a Charizard consume? And what’s the probability of catching a Pokémon? Once posed, these are questions your students will want to know the answer to. In this talk Dr Tom Crawford, aka Tom Rocks Maths, will show you how you too can incorporate video games into your lessons, and how technology can help to bring the topics to life.

Dr. Tom Crawford holds the position of Early Career Teaching and Outreach Fellow in Mathematics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, with a mission to share his love of math with the world. His award-winning website and associated social media profiles feature videos, podcasts, articles, and puzzles designed to make math more entertaining, exciting and enthralling for all. Crawford works with several partners including the BBC and the Numberphile YouTube channel - the largest math channel on the platform with over pi‑million subscribers.

Maple 2023 Gems You May Have Missed

Whether you have been using Maple 2023 since the day it came out, or haven’t had a chance to try it yet, chances are good there are still new features in Maple 2023 that you haven’t explored yet. This talk will give you a closer look at some of the improvements that our Maple Product Manager finds particularly useful or interesting. You may even get a few hints of more good things to come.

Giving Your Students More Practice Opportunities

Students have to do math to learn math, but there are only so many problems with solutions in the textbook. What can you do for your students when that’s not enough? In this session, you will learn about the various tools available in Maple and other products in the Maplesoft Mathematics Suite that will tell students if they answered a problem correctly, give them new problems to try, help them understand where they went wrong, and show them how to get back on track.

Creating Interactive Applications for Maple and Maple Learn

Maple 2023 introduced the Canvas Example Gallery, which provides template applications that illustrate the use of a wide variety of features such as clickable plots, interactive visualizations, quizzes, examples that provide solution steps, and more. The Maple code used to create these applications can be easily viewed, modified, and copied, so you can customize them or use them as a starting point for your own work. In this session, we will show you how to leverage the examples in the Gallery to create engaging and enlightening interactive applications designed specifically for your own students, without having to start from scratch. In many cases, it only takes a small tweak to the code to create very different applications, so you can create interactive experiences for your class quickly and with only minimal programming experience.

Efficient Maple Programming

In this presentation we will discuss a number of techniques, tips, and tricks to speed up your Maple code. These include choosing memory-efficient data structures, taking advantage of highly efficient commands such as map and seq to replace much slower for-loops, caching previous results to avoid re-computations, and more.

Discover the Maple Transactions Journal

Maple Transactions is an open-access journal that publishes expositions on topics of interest to the Maple community. The journal is intended for a broad audience of researchers, educators, students, and anyone else with an interest in Maple, and includes both peer-reviewed research articles and general interest content. The journal is free to read, and free to publish in. In this session, you’ll learn about the diversity of topics, content, and formats accepted by the journal, explore highlights of past issues, and get a chance to ask questions of the Editor-in-Chief.

Meet the Developers

Want to know more about what goes on behind the scenes at Maplesoft? This is your opportunity ask questions of members of the Maplesoft R&D team. The panel will include people who are highly involved with the development of various aspects of Maple, the Maple Calculator app, and Maple Learn. Between them, this panel has many(!!) years of experience developing products for doing, learning, and teaching math. This is meant to be an interactive session, so come with lots of questions!

Panelists

• Laurent Bernardin, President and CEO
• Paulina Chin, Software Architect
• Paul DeMarco, Senior Director – Maple Development
• Jürgen Gerhard, Senior Director – Advanced Research
• Valerie McKay-Crites, Intermediate Developer
• Erik Postma, Manager, Mathematical Software Group
• Karishma Punwani, Director, Product Management – Academic Market
• Andrew Smith, VP Product Development