Walking Randomly

Update (10th Feb 2010): There is an update to this post here.

I received a lot of feedback from my recent post Is Mathcad Dying? and, thanks to a couple of readers, I have learned of some new (new to me at least) information sources concerning this product and they all point to a major new mathematical product coming from PTC called Mathcad Prime.

The first ‘new’ Mathcad information source is the blog, Engineering with Mathcad, and its associated Twitter feed.  I am not sure if this blog is official or not because all of the posts are currently anonymous but the author(s) seems to know what is going on in the Mathcad world and it is well worth a look.

The second is another blog, simply called Mathcad, which is written by the Mathcad product management team.  It’s only been going since the beginning of the month but there are already some interesting posts there including The right tool for the job and Mathcad and Knovel Math.

So it looks like PTC DO have something up their sleeve in the form of a new product called Mathcad Prime.  Until very recently I hadn’t heard of it and I am yet to see some screenshots, videos or demos myself but it was apparently demonstrated at a PTC user conference recently. Google seems to know very little about it  at the moment though.

Perhaps news of Mathcad’s death has been greatly exaggerated!  Does anyone out there know more about this product?

I’ll start off this post by mentioning that I don’t like PTC’s Mathcad very much and think that is a very weak product compared to its competitors.  Professionally I have had a lot of grief with it and personally I cannot see why anyone who can also choose from Mathematica, MATLAB and Maple (and I am lucky enough to be in this position) would ever bother with it. Most of the things I choose to write about Mathcad concern its bugs.

So, read the following in the knowledge that the writer is heavily biased.

Just recently I have found myself wondering if the product is doomed.  Let’s look at the evidence.

• PTC’s Mathcad hasn’t seen a major new release in over 2 years.  Version 14 was released on 12th February 2007 and since then its competitors have gone from strength to strength.  In the same time MATLAB has seen 5 major new releases going from 2006b to 2009a and Mathematica has been improved beyond recognition in the transformation from version 5.2 to 7.01.  Then we have Maple which was at version 11 back in 2007 and is now at version 13.

Before anyone states the obvious, yes I know version numbers on their own mean very little but the increase in functionality in Mathcad’s competitors over the last 2 years or so has been substantial whereas Mathcad itself has gone nowhere.

• MathCad’s symbolic engine, Mupad, has since been bought by rival math software vendor and maker of MATLAB, The Mathworks.

When I first started working with Mathcad, it came with a cut-down version of the Maple kernel which took care of all of its symbolic calculations.  There was nothing particularly unusual about this as several other maths packages did exactly the same (MATLAB’s symbolic toolbox immediately springs to mind) but in the transition from v13 to v14, Mathcad swapped the Maple Kernel for Mupad.

Mupad was a nice product and, although there were problems with the transition, Mathcad could have done a lot worse in its choice of symbolic engine.  Of course, since version 14 of Mathcad was released the owners of this symbolic engine, Sciface Software, were completely bought out by MATLAB makers, The Mathworks, and now The Mathworks use Mupad as the basis for their symbolic toolbox.

So where does that leave Mathcad?  Will The Mathworks strike a licensing deal with PTC for the Mupad technology or will PTC have to find a replacement symbolic engine for version 15 of Mathcad?

• The maintenance releases don’t add very much

Every software manufacturer has maintenance releases which tend to be little more than a set of bug-fixes and extra tidbits of functionality to keep users happy between major releases.  Although we shouldn’t expect too much of them – we at least expect something worth justifying the download.  Here is the changelog from the latest maintenance release of Mathcad – Mathcad M030.

New features
* Windchill 9.1 M010 Workgroup Manager (WGM) support
* New installer – You can now customize your Mathcad installation by selecting the language, components, and directories.
* User interface translation into Russian
Problems fixed in Mathcad 14 M030
* 1436139: Addresses specific problems involving rapid consumption of memory upon repeated recalculation of a worksheet.
* 1502717: Fixes improper result returned when evaluating 2^31.
* 1507803 Addresses a specific memory leak issue relating to an uninitialized handle.
* 1507032 Addresses a compatibility problem resulting from an improvement in how numeric tolerance in integrals was inferred.
* 1547641 Fixes PDF file generation problem on Window XP x64 machines.
* 1437427 Fixes in-line evaluation to update display to match available value.
* 1587915 Addresses a WRITEPRN restriction by increasing the maximum allowable string length from 128 to 1024.
* 1403321 Addresses specific memory release issue involving large worksheet computations.

Although I am sure this is good news for Russian users I have to say that I’m underwhelmed!

So what do you think – Is Mathcad doomed or am I making a big fuss over nothing? Comments from Mathcad users are particularly welcomed.

Some time ago now I wrote about an integral that Mathcad 14 had trouble with and also asked if anyone could solve it by hand.

Well, James Graham-Eagle of the University of Massachusetts has risen to the challenge and provided me with the full solution as a pdf file which I offer to you all for your downloading pleasure.  Thanks James!

If you are a user of MATLAB’s Symbolic Toolbox then you are a user of the Maple 10 kernel since this is what MATLAB uses ‘under the hood’ in order to perform symbolic calculations. As of Septemeber 28th 2008 the Mathworks will be switching the kernel of the Symbolic Toolbox from Maple to Mupad. So should you care?

The answer is almost certainly yes. Mupad is completely different from Maple with a different set of abilities, behaviours and, inevitably, bugs. For example, things that didn’t work in Maple versions of the symbolic toolbox will start to work in the Mupad version. On the flip side, some things may stop working where there was once no problem.

I have been through this before when Mathcad switched from the Maple kernel to Mupad and there were a few issues but I support a much larger number of MATLAB symbolic toolbox users and so I am fearing the worst, but then I always do when something major changes like this.

An example of the kind of issue I came across when dealing with the Mathcad change included things like equation solvers changing their behavior due to using different algorithms internally. This sort of thing cropped up in problems that had multiple solutions such as when you try to find the roots of certain equations. Lecturers notes suddenly started disagreeing with the output because, for a given starting value, Mathcad converged to a different solution. No big deal in a class situation (in fact it might be a good learning experience) but not good if you have legacy code that depends upon that result.

Other bugs were a lot more embarrassing.

I’ll be honest – I do not know enough about either Maple or Mupad (I don’t even have access to Mupad in fact) to be able to decide if this change is going to be a good thing or not but one thing is for certain – it will be different and that will need to be managed.

The practical upshot is – when you upgrade, you should check all scripts that depend on the symbolic toolbox

Some people collect stamps, some collect coins. I collect bugs in computer algebra systems and this is a particularly amusing one in my opinion. If you evaluate 2^31 using Mathcad’s symbolic engine in version 14 then you get a negative result! It comes up with the following

2^31-> -2147 483648

Note the negative sign! No computer algebra system is perfect but it is not often that you get a bug from such an elementary calculation – shame on you Mathcad! At least it gets the right result if you use its numerical engine

2^31 = 2.147 *10^9

Hopefully PTC will be releasing a bug fix soon.

Just a quick one – someone sent me the following Mathcad bug report and so I thought I would share it. No problems with it in Mathematica or Matlab (using the symbolic toolbox). I find symbolic integration bugs interesting – especially if they come from one of the well known commercial packages such as Mathematica, Maple, Matlab or Mathcad. If you ever come across any then please do let me know in the comments.

The correct answer is Pi/8- 1/Pi which evaluates to about 0.074 so you can see from the image below that Mathcad gets the correct numerical result but fails to get the symbolic result.