Getting Started with MuPAD

Book excerpt: No book is born in a vacuum. There must always be somebody who needs the book, somebody who will read and use it, and somebody who will write it. I walked with the idea of this book for a long time. However, its final concept came into reality during my lectures, in February 2005, at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah in Borneo. I realized that my students needed a bit more than just my lectures. They needed a text that they could follow during lab sessions or after classes so they could learn at any time, at their own pace. Therefore, I decided to write a small book with just a few chapters covering the different areas of applying the Computer Algebra System called MuPAD in different areas of mathematics. I intended each chapter to be short enough to be covered in a reasonably short time, about 2 to 4 hours. Another important objective was to have each chapter completely independent of the others, so that the readers could easily select and read the chapters that they needed the most, without being forced to read the whole book. There was one obstacle for such a concept—the large number of graphics I used to visualize mathematics. Therefore, I finally decided to write a separate chapter covering the major concepts of MuPAD graphics. The graphics chapter, together with the introductory chapter, forms the base for all the remaining chapters.