69.7 Package scifac

Function: gcfac (expr) ¶

gcfac is a factoring function that attempts to apply the same heuristics which scientists apply in trying to make expressions simpler. gcfac is limited to monomial-type factoring. For a sum, gcfac does the following:

1. Factors over the integers.
2. Factors out the largest powers of terms occurring as coefficients, regardless of the complexity of the terms.
3. Uses (1) and (2) in factoring adjacent pairs of terms.
4. Repeatedly and recursively applies these techniques until the expression no longer changes.

Item (3) does not necessarily do an optimal job of pairwise factoring because of the combinatorially-difficult nature of finding which of all possible rearrangements of the pairs yields the most compact pair-factored result.

load("scifac") loads this function. demo(scifac) shows a demonstration of this function.