Thirty years ago mathematical, as opposed to applied numerical, computation was difficult to perform and so relatively little used. Three threads changed that: the emergence of the personal computer; the discovery of fiber-optics and the consequent development of the modern internet; and the building of the Three “M’s” Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.
We intend to persuade that Maple and other like tools are worth knowing assuming only that one wishes to be a mathematician, a mathematics educator, a computer scientist, an engineer or scientist, or anyone else who wishes/needs to use mathematics better. We also hope to explain how to become an `experimental mathematician' while learning to be better at proving things. To accomplish this our material is divided into three main chapters followed by a postscript. These cover elementary number theory, calculus of one and several variables, introductory linear algebra, and visualization and interactive geometric computation.