----R Fateman wrote: -----
>My guess is that GB takes a huge amount of time
>and is appropriate only for very small systems.
>I never ever recommend GB for any computation for
>which an alternative (e.g. resultants, gcd)
>exist. Do you have any real reason to think GB
>might be useful here?
Oh--I didn't mean to suggest that the grobner basis
is the cure all. I mentioned it because: (a) for this case,
it provided the information that Albert wanted and (b) since
the grobner code is buried deep in /share, I thought that
some users might not know Maxima had grobner basis code.
Simple-minded resultant based algorithms have worked
OK for most of the polynomial systems I've needed to solve.
Maxima's eliminate function could be smarter:
(a) it could make a better choice for the elimination order,
(b) assuming multiplicities aren't important, it could expunge
multiple roots (say using a square free factorization),
(c) it could expunge numerical factors.
Barton