Mention one of the Ms of mathematical software in the wrong company, and things are liable to erupt into a near-religious war. The Big 3--MATLAB, Mathematica, and Maple--have provided scientists, engineers, and students with a broad selection of technical computation tools for more than 20 years. This has resulted in a veritable land o plenty for those of us who need these sorts of programs.

Imagine if there were a half-dozen high-quality, Photoshop-caliber image-editing applications out there, constantly pushing each other to improve. As a result of this kind of competition, technical-computation systems have innovated at a dizzying pace.

The latest development comes from Maple, now at version 12. For this update, Maple has chosen to build on its strengths as a pedagogical tool and to strengthen its ties to the engineering and technical-computing arenas.

Like its closest competitor, Mathematica, Maple's original strength was in symbolic algebra. Over the years, both programs greatly enhanced their numerical-computation capabilities to bring them roughly up to par with MATLAB.

For most people, the choices between such packages are aesthetic and pragmatic but much of the choice also has to do with the system you were trained in. The learning curve for all these systems is quite steep, and even though there is much conceptual similarity between the packages, the devil is, as always, in the details.

On the engineering front, Maple 12 has been updated to work with a wide variety of CAD environments, including SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor. Alas, neither of these runs on the Macintosh natively, so this feature is not an option for Mac users. Maple 12 does support the exporting of figures in DXF format, and sophisticated users can always leverage the Maple application programming interface to write their own connections.

Of particular interest in version 12 is the optional MATLAB add-on toolbox that not only provides for communication between MATLAB (a numerical computing environment and programming language) and Maple, but which allows users to leverage their existing MATLAB code by converting it into native Maple. This will no doubt be of great benefit to those interested in making a transition from the clunky X11-based MATLAB environment or to folks with a large investment in legacy MATLAB code. This, in combination with new dynamical systems tools, is sure to appeal to engineers and scientists who regularly find themselves with control-system and state-space types of problems.

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