It covers several areas of technical computing, such as symbolic mathematics, numerical analysis, data processing, visualization, and others.

For instance, it can manipulate mathematical expressions and find symbolic solutions to certain problems, such as those arising from ordinary and partial differential equations.

Maple incorporates a dynamically typed imperative-style programming language (resembling Pascal), which permits variables of lexical scope.

Maple supports MathML 2.0, which is a W3C format for representing and interpreting mathematical expressions, including their display in web pages.

[4] There is also functionality for converting expressions from traditional mathematical notation to markup suitable for the typesetting system LaTeX.

Aiming for portability, they began writing Maple in programming languages from the BCPL family (initially using a subset of B and C, and later on only C).

[citation needed] In 1984, the research group arranged with Watcom Products Inc to license and distribute the first commercially available version, Maple 3.3.

The company's original goal was to manage the distribution of the software, but eventually it grew to have its own R&D department, where most of Maple's development takes place today (the remainder being done at various university laboratories[7]).

Between 1995 and 2005 Maple lost significant market share to competitors due to a weaker user interface.

The following code numerically calculates the roots of a high-order polynomial: The same command can also solve systems of equations: Plot