Hi Fabrizio,
The old Macsyma was especially good in the computations of symmetries of PDEs.
The package symmgrp.max, writteb by Champagne, Hereman and Winternitz, was
among the best softwares for that purpose.
Now this package lies in the website of W. Hereman
http://www.mines.edu/fs_home/whereman/ (together with its documentation) and it
seems that the possibility of porting it into the actual Maxima has never been
considered by the authors.
I guess that it would be worth doing this effort, and it could be a nice job
for a batchelor or master thesis in applied math (according to italian
standards). The math is not so complicated, and almost all is explained in the
documentation of symmgrp.max itself.
If you think that this idea is interesting, the steps would be:
1 Ask the authors the permission of taking their code in Maxima under GPL;
2 Check the code against the new maxima and do possible modification to make it
run with the new maxima;
3 Add new features to the code (there are a lot of possibilities in this
sense). There are a number of packages about group analysis of ODEs and PDEs
around, most of them are for Maple. One of the most famous is Vessiot, by
I. Anderson and coworkers (http://www.math.usu.edu/~fg_mp), unfortunately *not*
available with the source code (but I could ask for it). There is another one
whose source is available, Jets (http://diffiety.ac.ru).
I could help very much in steps 1 and 3, but I could be just be a beta-tester
as for 2, as I do not know lisp and maxima internals.
I wait for your comments.
Best, raf.
--
Raffaele Vitolo, Dipartimento di Matematica 'E. De Giorgi'
Universita' di Lecce, via per Arnesano 73100 Lecce ITALY
tel.: +39 0832 297425 (office) fax.: +39 0832 297594
home page: http://poincare.unile.it/vitolo