These are just a few Maxima-related questions that have bugged me over the last
week or so.
1) Reduced Row Echelon Form. This would be useful. Somebody must have
written a routine to do it, but it hasn't as yet found its way into the
share library. Is there one out there? (Maybe I should stop being lazy
and just roll up my sleeves...)
2) Minimal polynomial (of a matrix). Characteristic polynomial we have, but
minimal polynomial?
3) Help for share library. The share directory of Maxima contains some very
useful functionality: I've been using the routines for symbolic summation
(from share/contrib/Zeilberger) a bit. But help for these functions is
sadly lacking. What would be lovely is that when a share file is loaded,
appropriate help is loaded as well. So that, in my example
? GosperSum
would produce some help.
4) Help in general. Maxima seems to use info as the basis for its help files.
While info provides a nice hypertext interface for plain text, it
is not really
suitable for mathematics. Are there plans afoot to implement a
hyperTeX-based help? (Actually, two parallel help systems would be nice:
plain ascii, and TeX-based.) Even the html files seem to be just
translations from info; they contain no typeset mathematics or graphics.
5) ODE's with an extra parameter. My first year calculus students cut their
teeth on the sort of simple DE's which contain a proportionality constant
and two initial conditions:
dy/dx = ky(1-y), y(0)=1, y(10)=2
for example. So they need to determine k as well as the constant of
integration. I've been experimenting, but have yet to find an easy natural
way of solving such equations.
6) On the website
http://ltsn.mathstore.ac.uk/reviews/software.shtml
are a few reviews of Macsyma: 2.3 (from August 1998), Macysma 2.2 (May
1997). Both reviews are effusive in their praise. How does the
functionality of the current Maxima stack up against these older commercial
versions?
Don't knock yourselves out, folks, but I'd be interested if anyone has
an answer or two...
As you may have guessed, my interest in Maxima is as a teaching tool:
that it is GPL makes it immensely attractive.
-Alasdair