Dear Dave,
Dear Milan,
Many thanks, Dave, for your message and your having brought to
my attention the book by C. C. Mei, which also seems to be very
interesting.
I also tend to believe that, as you mention, there has been
another book by Ben-Israel, since there is the Editorial comment
for the present book in Amazon: "The authors enhanced their
calculus book with the computer algebra system Macsyma."
I do not know further details, but I tend to agree with you.
On perturbation methods there is also the classical book by
Richard H. Rand and Dieter Armbruster: Perturbation Methods,
Bifurcation Theory and Computer Algebra, Springer-Verlag,
New York, 1987,
which is available, as I confirmed, from Amazon. (I had also
bought it.) It includes a lot of interesting Macsyma code. Its
Appendix is distributed with Maxima (including Maxima 5.9.0).
Finally, as far as I am concerned, I had also bought (and have
still available) the book by
Abraham I. Beltzer, Variational and Finite Element Methods:
A Symbolic Computation Approach, Springer, Berlin, 1990
which exclusively and extensively uses Macsyma in many
interesting engineering problems. Unfortunately, it is out-of-print
now and it will never appear again. Perhaps, this is the book
in the comment by Dave in his recent message:
> which is now out of print (something to do with variational
> methods and symbolic computation).
Personally, I had also been interested in the (second) classical
book by
Richard H. Rand, Computer Algebra in Applied Mathematics:
An Introduction to MACSYMA, Pitman Publishing, Boston, 1984,
which is not available any more, but, probably, it can be found
in several Libraries.
Dear Milan,
I believe it would be an interesting book for you (and for me too,
but I cannot find this book in Greece).
There are also so many papers with Macsyma in several volumes
with collections of papers on symbolic computation. (I have
available few of these.)
But perhaps the best choice for you just now is to study Cliff's
book and Cliff has been so kind to make it available in PDF through
an e-mail attachment. (This is surely preferable to attempting to
prepare this PDF file yourself from the LaTeX sources distributed
with Maxima 5.9.0 in the directory \doc\maximabook after unzip.)
Many thanks to Cliff for his kind help and really so careful work
with Maxima.
The final point would be the preparation of a new Maxima
Reference Manual taking into account the present commands'
status of Maxima 5.9.0 (and in the share library too) and including
instructions, comments and examples for all of the commands (after
actual tests of them) in a uniform way, this is very important. Mike
may wish to undertake this task, I am not sure, but it requires much
time and effort for a complete revision of his present so interesting
and already very useful DOE-Maxima Reference Manual. In fact,
I consult it quite frequently.
Many thanks again and best regards,
Nikos
----- Original Message -----
From: "David and Michele Holmgren" <holmgrenm at shaw>
To: "Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis" <ioakimidis@otenet.gr>; "Milan Zimmermann"
<milan.zimmermann@sympatico.ca>
Cc: <maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu>; "Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis"
<ioakimidis@otenet.gr>
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2003 2:02 AM
Subject: Re: [Maxima] Macsyma vs. Maxima, book
> Hi - Thanks for the information. I don't think that I replied to the
whole
> list earlier, but there was (I think) another book by Ben-Israel which is
> now out of print. I've had a look at the web page in the meantime. You
may
> also be interested in "Mathematical Analysis in Engineering" by C.C. Mei,
> which has an appendix on Macsyma (perturbation methods, but with
> introductory material as well) relating to some of the text material.
>
> Dave