MuPAD was a Computer algebra system (CAS). Originally developed by the MuPAD research group at the University of Paderborn, it is developed since 1997 by the company SciFace Software GmbH & Co. KG in cooperation with the MuPAD research group and partners from some other universities.

Until autumn 2005 the version MuPAD Light was offered for free for research and education, but as consequence of closing the home institute of the MuPAD research group there is now only the version MuPAD Pro available with costs.

The MuPAD kernel is bundled with Scientific Notebook and Scientific Workplace. Former versions of MuPAD Pro were bundled with SciLab. It was adopted as the CAS engine for the MathCAD software package in its version 14 release.

In September 2008, Sciface was purchased by Mathworks Inc and the Mupad code was included in the symbolic toolbox add-on for Matlab. From 28 September 2008, Mupad was withdrawn from market as a software product in its own right.

Functionality

MuPAD offered

• a computer algebra system to manipulate formulas symbolically
• program packages for linear algebra, differential equations, number theory, statistics, functional programming
• an interactive graphic system that supports animations and transparent areas in 3D
• classic and verified numerical analysis in discretionary accuracy
• a programming language that supports object orientation and functional programming

Often used commands were accessible via menus. MuPAD offered a notebook concept similar to word processing systems that allowed the formulation of mathematical problems as well as graphics visualization and explanations in formatted text. It was possible to extend MuPAD with C++ routines to accelerate calculations. Also Java-code could be embedded.

MuPAD's syntax was modeled on Pascal, and was similar to the one used in the Maple computer algebra system. An important difference between the two was that MuPAD provides support for object-oriented programming. This means that each object "carries with itself" the methods allowed to use on it. For example, after defining

 A := matrix([[1,2],[3,4]] )

all of the following are valid expressions and give the expected result:

 A+A, -A, 2*A, A*A, A^-1, exp(A ), A.A, A^0, 0*A

where A.A is the concatenated 2x4 matrix, while all others, including the last two, are again 2x2 matrices.

References

External links

• MuPAD Research Group official site
• SciFace Software, MuPAD distributor
• MuPAD community online magazine