Solving (systems of) non-linear equations?



On 3/19/07, Alasdair McAndrew <amca01 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does Maxima implement any general method of solving these?  There are a few
> Newton's methods, but is that all?  Is there a Brent's method in there
> somewhere, or a Broyden's method for systems, for example?  Should I write
> some?

Aside from Newton's method, there are no other algorithms to solve
nonlinear or nonpolynomial systems of equations in Maxima
(so far as I know). If you or your students want to work on that,
that would be terrific. Maybe a workable place to start is the
Fortan code at Netlib. Fortran can be translated automatically
to Lisp via the f2cl program.

FWIW
Robert