Partial solution for bug 1452341: solve(x^(5/2)+1,x)

On 5/25/06, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
> rather than change ratsimp so that it works harder (sometimes MUCH
> harder),
> I suggest trying to prove the solutions by using radcan, under control of
> a flag.


I wasn't suggesting making ratsimp as powerful as radcan, and therefore
incurring the overhead of gcd's over messy objects etc.  And I
certainlywasn't suggesting that ratsimp would ever do a perfect job of
simplifying to
zero.

But there are some simple cases that I'd think ratsimp could tackle, such
as:

        ratsimp 5^(1/3)*(5^(1/2)+5^(1/3))  =>  5^(5/6)+5^(2/3)
but
        ratsimp 5^(1/2)*(5^(2/3)+5^(1/3)) does not expand to
5^(5/6)+5*5^(1/6)