Introduction

This document introduces Maple, a commercial computer program for mathematical computation. You can learn about Maple from its website http://www.maplesoft.com/. The numerical, symbolic, and graphical features of Maple are prodigious; as such, its usefulness to the working mathematician goes without saying. This guide is meant to be a gentle introduction to some of the powerful features that this system provides.

Once installed, you cay run Maple either in shell mode by typing maple in a terminal or by typing xmaple which runs Maple in a graphical user interface. As with most high-level computer systems, Maple has its own programming language that allows users to make their own functions and libraries, building on Maple's internal procedures.

At the end of this document are several exercises of varying levels of difficulty.