--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Note that gamalg is NOT in commercial Macsyma for
> the reason I stated.
Probably it shouldn't be in Maxima either - if it is broken anyway we
don't lose any (current) functionality. Respecting Wolfram's wishes
would be the Right Thing.
> I think that if FeynCalc is exactly the specification
> you want, that is useful information: it could be
> possible to replicate it in Maxima. I don't know how
> many people know both Mathematica and Maxima, but
> you are clearly one of them!
FeynCalc would certainly be an excellent candidate for translation to
Maxima - my undergrad high energy physics department put me to work
installing FeynCalc on every copy of Mathematica we had. IIRC it is
more or less a standard in High Energy Physics.
I think http://www.feynarts.de/ is or used to be related to FeynCalc,
and probably also deserves a look. It handles generation and
visualization of Feynman diagrams and amplitudes, although whether
gnuplot is up to supporting that I have no idea. (Memory is coming
back now - ironically enough, the original version of Feynarts was
written for Macsyma. I emailed the authors trying to find whether that
code existed or not, but I think the conclusion was either that it
didn't or it was on old tapes somewhere. In any case such code would
be far behind the current feature sets.)
FeynCalc is located at www.feyncalc.org It is LGPL according to the
lastest readme, which isn't terribly relevant since we can't use it
directly but does indicate that a direct translation is not likely to
raise objections. It is a SERIOUS Mathematica package - several
megabytes plus of code. Porting Feyncalc would be a significant
undertaking, but it would do three very good things:
1) Provide Maxima with first rate high energy physics tools, which
would stand a good chance of making us much more interesting to physics
departments, particularly those with limited budget for Mathematica.
2) Give us a fairly good idea what is involved porting Mathematica
code to Maxima, which will probably come up in the future.
3) Put Maxima through some new shakedowns. Being able to do all that
Feyncalc asks would be a nice sticker to put on the side of the box
;-).
CY
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