Major New Release of Maplesoft Flagship Product Radically Improves Ease of Use for Academic Market; Maple 10 is the Most Powerful and Intuitive Tool for Solving Complex Mathematical Problems and Creating Rich, Executable Technical Documents.

WATERLOO, Canada -- Maplesoft(TM), the leading provider of high-performance software tools for engineering, science and mathematics, today announced Maple 10, a major release of the company's flagship product that reinvents modern technical research and education. By shifting the emphasis from creating math to making it more accessible and easy to use, Maple 10 increases researchers' productivity, provides teachers a better environment for developing customized curriculum and lowers the learning curve for students.

"For over two decades, Maplesoft has provided academic institutions around the world with fundamental and critical technology for research and teaching in technical fields," said Jim Cooper, CEO of Maplesoft. "With Maple 10, we are raising the bar by delivering the most powerful and intuitive tool for mathematical research and education. From complex computations to basic math concepts, Maple 10 opens the door to easier understanding and better productivity and results for researchers, professors and students."

Maple 10 delivers the most advanced, complete and error-free set of math capabilities on the market, developed and tested over 25 years and supported by a host of new tools that make it faster and easier to put complex math into action. The product seamlessly combines numeric and symbolic calculations, explorations, mathematical notation, documentation, buttons and sliders, and graphics and animations that can be shared and reused. Maple 10 enables users to convey information in a familiar way, such as the look and feel of a textbook or technical paper, and also as executable documents that provide the final answer.

Maple 10 is the ideal analytical companion for academic researchers. The product enables users to eliminate algebraic, derivation and unit errors; expand the scope of research; and quickly and easily validate results and derivations.

In addition to being a premier research tool, Maple 10 enables educators to deliver dynamic course content and illustrate even the most difficult concepts. Math, engineering and science instructors can engage students like never before by using Maple 10 to offer interactive demonstrations and explorations, as well as to prepare lecture material, handouts, and exercises.

Furthermore, Maple 10 improves student comprehension levels and scholastic performance by providing the ability to illustrate mathematical concepts, visualize problems and illuminate theory. Moreover, since companies and institutions around the world rely on Maplesoft to solve engineering and scientific problems, using Maple 10 in their studies is a terrific way for students to get a head start in their careers.

"Maple is an invaluable tool for teaching and learning math," said Jim Herod, Professor Emeritus, who teaches remotely for Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Mathematics. "Since the students in my Partial Differential Equations class are scattered all over the country, Georgia Tech sends the lectures to them on CDs. The students then use Maple worksheets to make the calculations associated with each lecture. They also use Maple to ask questions about the lectures and to complete assignments. I have been teaching with Maple for more than 15 years and Maple is so different from what it was years ago. Maple 10 will make it even easier for students to solve and analyze complex problems that were not accessible thirty years ago, and generally are not presented in textbooks even now."

Key Features and Benefits of Maple 10

Maple 10 offers users numerous new features designed to enhance usability, encourage knowledge capture and add to Maple's hallmark mathematical power.

Ease of Use

--A sophisticated Math Equation Editor lets users create textbook-quality equations in natural mathematical notation, interactively. It includes expression templates, a handwriting palette, over a thousand mathematical symbols, and automatic equation numbering. This provides full content and presentation control to the user.

--Context sensitive menus provide only applicable operations depending on the context, such as math operations, adjusting plots, applying units, and changing palettes. For example, right clicking an expression provides a menu of commands that are only meaningful to that particular expression. This greatly enhances speed and ease of use.

--Task templates and interactive task assistants enable fill-in-the-blank problem solving for over 200 different tasks.

--Create Maplets using the drag-and-drop interface of the Maplet Builder or enhance worksheets with embedded GUI components. Components, such as sliders and buttons can be embedded within Maple worksheets or deployed to the Web via MapleNet.

--Major plotting and animation enhancements, such as an automated point-and-click Plot Builder, gridlines, axes properties, and glossiness of surfaces make it fast and easy to visualize and present results in intuitive, high-quality 2-D and 3-D graphics.

--A Graphing Calculator allowing access to the full power of Maple via a familiar, intuitive interface.

--Clickable calculus that allows the user to define problems, compute, integrate, differentiate, plot, animate, and explore parameters all in a point-and-click, easy-to-use interface.

--A point-and-click ODE (Ordinary Differential Equations) Analyzer allows detailed and sophisticated investigation and analysis of ODE systems.

Knowledge Capture

--Full presentation control enables users to write and layout textbook-style content, which include live calculations while hiding the computation details. This capability allows knowledge to be captured and shared, providing not only the answer but the thinking behind the analysis.

--An integrated, extensible dictionary provides definitions of over 5000 engineering and mathematical terms, enhancing the ability to document, communicate and share detailed technical information.

Deep Math

--Enhanced code generation capability that ensures any math model can automatically generate the user's choice of C, Fortran, Java(TM), MATLAB(R) or Visual Basic(R) software code for embedded applications.

--Units and/or tolerance (error ranges) support that applies to any variable or constant. Units and tolerance are carried through all calculations, allowing engineers to check both the final units (dimensional analysis) and tolerance or degree of uncertainty of the final result.

--A new statistics package includes a collection of functions and interactive tools for mathematical statistics and data analysis. The package supports a wide range of common statistical tasks such as quantitative and graphical data analysis, symbolic manipulation of random variables, simulation, and curve fitting.

--State-of-the-art differential equation solvers that use new sophisticated special functions to represent solutions to many formerly unsolvable families of linear and nonlinear differential equations.

--Support for integer linear programming, choice of solver methods, automatic plotting of objective function and constraints in the Optimization Assistant.

--Compiled function option for dramatic speed increases in numerical computation time.

--Numerous other improvements and additions, including numerical differentiation, fractional and abstract order derivatives, polynomial ideas, and hardware computations using complex numbers.

Availability

Single user academic licenses of Maple 10 are available for US $995.00. Volume, upgrade, and student discounts apply. Maple 10 is available directly from the Maplesoft Web Store at http://webstore.maplesoft.com. Outside of the US & Canada, Maple 10 is available from Maplesoft reseller partners. A list of partners is available online at http://www.maplesoft.com/contact/international/index.aspx.

About Maplesoft

Maplesoft is a leading developer and provider of interactive mathematical software. Its suite of products includes Maple, the most powerful and intuitive tool for solving complex mathematical problems and creating rich, executable technical documents; MapleNet, a Web-based platform for sharing Maple content for collaboration and e-learning; and Maple T.A., a Web-based system for creating tests, assignments and exercises, automatically assessing student responses and performance. Its standards-compliant algorithms are renowned for their speed, accuracy and reliability. In addition, Maplesoft leads the market with innovations that make the management of technical knowledge - whether in industry, or in a classroom - more effective and efficient. Over two million users at thousands of organizations benefit from advanced Maple technology. The Maplesoft commercial customer base includes Boeing, Bosch, Canon and NASA. Additionally, virtually every major university and research institute in the world, including MIT, Stanford, Oxford and Waterloo, has adopted Maplesoft products to enhance their education and research activities. For more information, visit www.maplesoft.com.