Doing Mathematics

Doing Mathematics with Scientific WorkPlace by Darel Hardy and Carol Walker was published by Brooks/Cole in 1994.

This was the start of an incredible journey. At the 1994 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Cincinnati, Carol Walker told me about a revolutionary software product that would soon be released. It was being developed by a small company in Las Cruces that had previously sold the typesetting software T3. Their new 1992 product, Scientific Word®, was designed to create and compile TEX files without the need to know TEX. It had an easy-to-use editor to create complicated mathematical formulas. Roger Hunter had the insight to add an interface to the computer algebra system Maple®, and this enhanced product would be called Scientific WorkPlace®. Instead of the rigid format required to use Maple® directly, Roger decided to translate formulas from Scientific WorkPlace® directly into Maple®, shielding the rigid Maple® format from the user.

Carol had agreed to help write documentation to show Scientific WorkPlace® users how to easily access the power of Maple. A writing project that looked feasible started to look overwhelming when she started working in the dean’s office.

Somehow my name came up. I had worked a lot with Maple®, so perhaps that was a part of it. At any rate, she asked if there were any way that I might help out. I was a dedicated Mac user, and Scientific WorkPlace® was designed to run only on PCs. On the other hand, this looked like a wonderfully exciting project, one that does not come along very often. I bought a PC, started working with alpha and beta versions of Scientific WorkPlace®, and started exchanging TEX files with Carol.

From time to time we would ask John Thomas how some of the mathematics would eventually look. His response was, “How should it look? You decide how it should look, and I will write the Maple® interface to match.” We went through two revisions of manuscripts that had been edited by Susan Bagby, and had a print version a month or two before the release of Scientific WorkPlace® in August of that same year.

Since that time, Carol and I continued to write revisions of the computational documentation as the company was bought, then sold, by Brooks/Cole® and eventually bought by Barry MacKichan, who renamed the company MacKichan Software®.

MacKichan Software closed its doors on June 30, 2021. Scientific Word will be available in the public domain and permanent licenses for Scientific WorkPlace remain in place.