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Preliminaries about Maple

Maple is a comprehensive general purpose computer algebra system which can do symbolic and numerical calculations and has facilities for 2- and 3-dimensional graphical output. Calculus courses may be structured so that Maple can be used as a tool that will help you gain a complete understanding of the material discussed. You will discover that the capability of Maple goes well beyond the realm of calculus; it is a tool that is used more and more in education and scientific research in mathematics and engineering.

This chapter is a brief introduction to the use of Maple in the environment that you will discover at Stony Brook. It is not exhaustive and its sole purpose is to guide you through the first steps needed to start using this tool. Once you become familiar with the basics of Maple and can appreciate its advantages, we encourage you to experiment with it, not only to learn mathematics in more detail but also to help you in other courses and your own research. More advanced documentation is available on line, in the computer lab, and in the library.

Maple runs on many different types of computers and operating systems. For example, you might use Maple from a Sun workstation running Solaris (a flavor of Unix) in the computer lab, from a Windows computer in the library, and from a Macintosh at home. Maple behaves similarly on all of them; we will usually point it out when we use something specific to one type of computer.



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Translated from LaTeX by Scott Sutherland
2002-08-29