Maple

With Maple, you can easily visualize your work by using 2-D and 3-D plots and animations. Maple supports over 170 plot types and options, including implicit, contour, complex, polar, vector field, conformal, density, ODE, PDE, and statistical plots.

Plot Creation

In Maple, plots and animations are very easy to create. Point-and-click tools allow you to create a huge variety of 2-D and 3-D plots and animations, from standard 2-D plots to the animation of the flow of a vector field. Interactive tools also let you control many different plot options before and after the plot has been created. Once a plot has been created in the Maple document, you can even add new curves to the plot simply by dragging and dropping in the mathematical expression. These plot creation tools are all mouse-driven and can all be used without ever having to know a single command.

However, you are not restricted to point-and-click interactions. You also have full programmatic access to visualization tools. You can create plots and animations using the underlying commands or you can embed these commands in your own procedures to create more complicated and customized plots programmatically.

Interaction with Plots

Plots in Maple are not static images. You can pan and zoom interactively to get a better look at areas of interest. You can rotate 3-D plots in real-time. You can control animations using playback and speed controls.

You can also create applications in which plots are updated automatically because sliders and dials are used to change parameters. You can even create plots that capture and respond to mouse clicks. For example, you can create a curve-fitting application that dynamically illustrates how a curve changes as new points are added.

Plots can even be easily exported to a variety of formats using interactive tools, as well as commands.

Plot Customization

It is easy to customize the appearance of plots in Maple. Point-and-click tools or command options can be used to change a variety of options, such as colors, axis labels, placement of tick marks, legends, lighting models, and glossiness. You can even define a color-value function for 3-D plots.

Further plot annotation tools allow you to add arrows, text, math, shapes, and free-hand drawings to your plots.