Wednesday, August 29, 2007,
10:50 PM
"Maple is a very powerful software for doing mathematics. In this course, we would like to introduce students to this powerful software. We are going to learn how to use certain basic commands of Maple by solving some problems related to MA1102R.
It is hoped that by the end of the laboratory sessions, students will be able to appreciate the use of Maple and continue to use the software in their future courses and projects..."
That is the introduction to the lab manual for using Maple for MA1102R - Calculus... Cool as it sounds... the worst (or maybe not!) was yet to come...
A bunch of us went to the lab today to settle our Maple quiz so that we can quickly punch in the answers and get it over with... No problem, we thought... 30-45 minutes should settle it... Right??? WRONG!!!
4/5 questions was rather easy... just punch in the commands, count and tip tap here and there... poof! answer out! simple. easy... Then came... question number 2...
Sigh... Question number 2... TWO... T-W-O... just evaluate a certain number to 2 d.p. ... sounds simple... Yeah right!
I punched in the commands... there was a 17 s.f. number there... the answer came out... 2.9 x 10^30... alright. Answer done. NOT! Some girl beside me punched in 100 d.p. and came out 0.7499.......
Then, I was like, "!!!" Hmmm... interesting... but confusing...
Horace was sitting behind me and he tried the same thing, got so many different answers... it was like, Maple went haywire... but we called it, "MAGIC!"... ROFL stuff...
Ok, so... maybe there was something wrong with the programming, so we decided to split the expressions and evaluated them separately...
This further yielded something one would not see if they evaluated everything at once...
NUTS!!! Who would've known???
We got the answer at last, after much logical deduction, typing of commands and working together... after 2 long hours, that is...
Maple Madness...
Can't wait for the next quiz!!!
