Ma 375A course in Communicating Mathematics with Maple and LaTeX

given by

Paul Eakin and Carl Eberhart

Department of Mathematics

University of Kentucky

Class 1 The Tools

Maple LaTeX Chisel CD

What are Maple and LaTeX?

Maple is a language for posing, investigating, and solving mathematical problems.

LaTeX is a language for preparing Mathematical documents for publication.

A knowledge of these languages equips you to communicate mathematics both with yourself and with the outside world.

More on Maple Worksheet Environment -- like a sheet of paper Use it like a graphing calculator Use it to make 3d movies You can do algebra in a Maple worksheet Maple has a large mathematical vocabulary You can extend the vocabulary You have to buy it (think: “it’s a book”)

More on LaTeX You don’t have to buy it

Based on TeX, a mathematical typesetting language invented by Donald Knuth

LaTeX is used extensively by the scientific community at the university level.

Use it to write math texts.

Maple worksheets can be exported to LaTeX.

The Chisel CD Has a complete LaTeX system on it called MiKTeX. This can

be run right off the CD.

Contains a large database of existing LaTeX source documents, from quizzes to books.

Has a MapleV4 demo worksheet reader with subsistence computational ability

Contains a large database of Maple worksheets, arranged into books.

Installing Chisel Get the CD from

http://www.ms.uky.edu/~chisel Stick it in your Cdrom drive Initially you may want to choose a

minimal installation. After installation, you have a

Chisel icon on your desktop. Click It.

Searching the Chisel Pick a word, like function, and see

where it occurs on the Chisel disk

The disk contains mws , tex, dvi, and ps files.. These are read by MapleV4, Wordpad, yap, and gsview32 respectively.

Next Time

We will go through this again in more detail