Schori, Dick

Oregon State University

Department of Mathematics

Corvallis, OR 97331

schori@math.orst.edu



Converting Mathematica Notebooks To Maple Worksheets



     My current IMPT project is to convert the Project CALC Mathematica 

Notebooks, authored by William Barker, into Maple worksheets.  Barker, of 

Bowdoin College, created a quality collection of interactive mathematics 

laboratories by rewriting, expanding, and adding to the original Project 

CALC labs. I and my Oregon State undergraduate assistant, Todd Coffey, have 

converted most of the 25 first year Calculus labs into Maple.  The 

following is a brief discussion of the process. 



     Routine procedures!

 1) Move the ASCII Mathematica Notebook files on a MAC to a DOS disk and 

load them into a standard word processor.

 2) Strip control characters (for fonts, color, etc.) from files with 

recursive macros.

 3) Use search and replace routines for obvious changes such as Mathematica 

-> Maple, [..] -> (..), {..} -> [..], Sin -> sin, c sin(x) -> c*sin(x) and 

"open the following closed cell" -> "activate the following command line".



     More demanding.

 1) Convert Mathematica commands, syntax, and procedures into Maple ones.  

This requires considerable expertise in Maple.

 2) Rewrite parts of text to reflect changes of a technical nature, such as 

Mathematica Tips -> Maple Tips.

 3) Rewrite parts of text where pedagogy needs to be changed because of 

differences between Mathematica and Maple.



     To write effective interactive mathematics texts in either Mathematica 

or Maple in calculus, it is necessary that authors have considerable 

expertise with those tools in order to implement the sound pedagogical 

ideas that are the most important part of the IMTP.



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