BACKGROUND

There are a number of intrinsic Maple commands (i.e., commands that you do not need to load a package to use) that will be useful in this lab. What follows is a short synopsis of these commands. Examples are in the next section.

Intrinsic Commands

solve

solve an equation analytically (exact arithmetic).

fsolve

solve an equation numerically (floating-point arithmetic).

diff

The basic command for differentiating expressions.

D

The basic command for differentiating functions.

evalm

Evaluates expressions involving vectors (and matrices).

evalf

Evaluates expressions to floating-point approximation.

subs

Substitutes a value into an expression.

Commands from the linalg package

Here is a list of the Maple commands we will be using from the linalg package. Note that these commands form only a small subset of this package which is designed primarily for linear algebra. Examples for some of the commands are given on the next page; more examples can be found in the Help screens for each command.

vector

Used to define a vector or vector-valued function.

scalarmul

Multiplies a vector or a vector-valued function by a scalar.

innerprod

Computes the dot product (also called the ``inner product'') of two vectors or vector-valued functions.

crossprod

Computes the cross product of two vectorsor vector-valued functions.

Written by: JDF (E-Mail: bach@wpi.edu)
Last Updated: Sunday, 21 September 2003
Copyright 2003, Joseph D. Fehribach