Hi Alasdair,
I've taken the liberty of forwarding your message to the mailing list.
All of these ideas sounds really good to me. It would be a
very useful exercise to walk through this list and identify
what is and is not already implemented. About your students,
by all means, point them in the direction of the mailing list and
we'll take it from there ... 8^)
best,
Robert Dodier
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alasdair McAndrew
Date: Nov 22, 2005 5:09 PM
Subject: Maxima wishlist
To: Robert Dodier
Since you asked... here is my wish list for Maxima:
1) Good number theory package. Since Maxima uses arbitrary precision
arithmetic, this should be accompanied by a good computational number
theory package: modular powers, inverses, extended euclidean
algorithm, chinese remainder theorem, factorization (using all the
best methods, up to and including the number field sieve), discrete
logarithms, modular square and nth roots, primitive roots.
2) Graph theory. Creating graphs (weighted, unweighted, directed,
undirected), drawing graphs (this would require another plotting
package to gnuplot), modifying graphs, testing for planarity, euler
and hamiltonian paths and circuits. Minimal spanning trees, shortest
paths, coloring and matching, flow algorithms.
3) Boolean algebra and logic. Simplification of boolean expressions,
truth tables, satisfyability, disjuntive and conjunctive canonical
forms, checking for tautologies and contradictions.
4) Linear Algebra. I'd like to be able to compute reduced row echelon
form, and some matrix decompositions (LU, QR, Cholesky etc).
5) User interface. This isn't a problem for me (I switch between
maxima, xmaxima, imaxima in emacs, maxima in TeXmacs), but it could be
a problem for teaching. One nice modern-sh interface would be nice.
6) Help. We've discussed this before...
Well, there we are! Should I gather some postgraduate students and
tell them to get cracking with some coding?
cheers,
Alasdair