Maple 9.5 review

There are two main contenders for the position of most popular maths program: Maple and Mathematica. The competition has created a battle of features that continues with the launch of Maple 9.5

It may be only a 0.5 upgrade, which usually signifies only minor improvements, but in this case there's a raft of new features worthy, in our opinion, of pushing the software to the next version.

There is now a docking tool palette, which makes the entry of equations much easier. If you've spent years learning how to use Maple then you probably won't be impressed, but it makes the program easier for beginners and occasional users.

The developers of Maple are keen to tell you about the improved facilities for solving a range of types of differential equations. A new optimisation package complete with a 'Maplet' assistant, Maple's version of a wizard, makes some difficult problems easy to solve. There's also a large range of smaller improvements thoughout the symbolic manipulation facilities.

Another valuable new feature is the Knowledge Management dictionary of mathematical terms, which can be used to help you find your way through a topic. For a first edition this is very good but a few more formulae and even the occasional chart would be welcome improvements. More important for the beginner are the assistants which help you create Maple worksheets that solve problems for you. There is also a new range of educational 'tutors' for pre-calculus through one- and multi-variable calculus to linear algebra. These are really just worksheets where you can increase your understanding by adjusting parameters. In most cases, though, if you don't know what the point of the exercise is, then you won't have much of an idea of what is going on.

For anyone wanting to move from Mathematica to Maple, there is a new conversion tool. However, this isn't as useful as it might be as it doesn't convert Mathematica programs, which probably form the bulk of the sort of worksheets you might want to use again.

With a host of other new features - including better graphics, improved programability, new polynomial tools and new text formatting - this upgrade is essential for Maple 9 users.