BACKGROUND

Purpose | Background (with Examples) | Exercises

This section gives a brief introduction to the plotting and computing commands that you will need in this lab. Maple in fact has far more commands than those mentioned here, and you can find out about them using the Help menu in the upper right corner of the Maple window.


Loading Packages.

Because Maple has so many commands that are not needed in every case, Maple is written with a set of intrinsic commands that are automatically available whenever one starts Maple, plus a number of packages of commands that are only available when they are loaded. One of these packages was written locally at WPI and therefore requires a special init file to load. Specifically some of the commands are from the plots, linalg and CalcP7 packages. To load these packages, one must enter the following commands at the Maple prompt (>) 
  > with(plots):

  Warning, the name changecoords has been redefined


  > with(linalg):
and 
  > with(CalcP7):
Notice that each of these commands ends with a colon while most Maple commands end with a semicolon. The colon surpresses the standard output of the command, saving space when this output is not needed.

Note Well: Before one can issue the command 

  > with(CalcP7):
for the first time, one needs to issue the UNIX command 
  UNIX_Prompt> cp  ~bach/.mapleinit  ~
to copy the appropriate mapleinit file from Prof. Fehribach's home directory (~bach) to ones own home directory (~). If you have already started a Maple session, you will need to restart Maple to correctly initialize Maple before loading CalcP7.


Differentiation and Plotting Commands.

The most important commands for this lab are the following:
diff
The basic command for differentiating expressions.
D
The basic command for differentiating functions.
plot3d
Plots the surface z = f(x,y) in 3D.
implicitplot
Plots in 2D the level curves for f(x,y) .
implicitplot3d
Plots in 3D the level surfaces for F(x,y,z) .
TanPlane
Finds tangent plane for a given surface at a given point.
Maple Help screens are available for all of these commands, so refer to them for further examples.


Starting Maple.

It's time to start Maple. This can be done at a UNIX prompt, but to make things easy for now, you may open the Maple session for this lab using the following link:

Partial Derivatives and Tangent Planes

The Maple session above contains a number of examples which should be useful in completing the exercises for this lab.


Purpose | Background (with Examples) | Exercises

Written by: JDF (E-Mail: bach@wpi.edu)
Last Updated: Saturday, 23 August 2003
Copyright 2003, Joseph D. Fehribach