The Maple computation engine combines high-performance numeric computations with world-leading symbolic capabilities. Maple’s hybrid system provides many advantages:

• Maple allows you to work with exact quantities such as fractions, radicals, and symbols, eliminating accumulated round-off errors.
• Approximations can be computed at any precision that is required, and are not restricted by hardware limitations.
• You can choose from a variety of approximate and exact techniques, as best suits your needs.
• Maple allows you to defer numeric approximations until they are needed, using symbolic parameters in your problem instead. The parameters are then carried through each stage in your analysis, making it easy to do parameter sweeps, optimize values, and study the behavior of the system.
• Symbolic computations allow you to obtain highly accurate results, eliminate the need to simplify problems by hand, and provide insight into your problem structure from which you can develop conjectures and conclusions about the behavior.
• Internally, Maple’s solvers can also use a combination of symbolic and numeric techniques, allowing it to solve problems for which either approach alone would be insufficient.