Symbolic Math - A Workflow

http://www.hippasus.com/resources/symmath/index.html#.UTBt2jkOTYQ.hackernews

by thealphanerd • 13 years ago

1 2 13 years ago

lutusp• 13 years ago

> This workflow/tutorial is designed to remedy these three problems. The tool chosen - Maxima - is available for free, as is all its supporting software ...

Hey, knock yourself out, but Sage (http://www.sagemath.org/) integrates, and improved on, Maxima, and represents a much more advanced free tool for symbolic mathematics.

Also, there's Sympy (http://sympy.org/en/index.html), a Python library that does symbolic mathematics and would be a much better and simpler way for you to explain and demonstrate symbolic mathematics in a tutorial. Let's use Sympy to solve a quadratic:

    from sympy import *
    var('x a b c')
    sol = solve(a * x**2 + b * x + c,x)
    print(sol)
    print(latex(sol))

Output:

    [(-b + (-4*a*c + b**2)**(1/2))/(2*a), -(b + (-4*a*c + b**2)**(1/2))/(2*a)]

Rendered Latex: http://i.imgur.com/Z4yKvkq.png

thealphanerd• 13 years ago

Thanks for the heads up. I'm taking a signal processing class at the moment (https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/420/) and the professor is an old school unix guy. He still lives in emacs. That being said I am totally open to various different languages / environments to do symbolic mathematics. I don't have a background in mathematics, so I feel my time might be better spent learning higher level concepts then trudging in the algebra trenches

Symbolic Math - A Workflow

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