On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 02:41:50PM -0500, Thomas Widlar wrote:
> My friend has had good success with Maxima on his project. He makes the
> comment --
>
> It seems Maxima is not able to handle partial differential equations
> (with several variables),
> only ordinary differential equations.
It is true that maxima has nothing for pre-canned methods of solving
PDEs (such as finite element method or whatever) but maxima provides
many tools that can be used for solving PDEs.
I think the main problem with PDEs is that they are controlled by so
many factors, such as geometry, boundary conditions, initial
conditions, time evolution of geometry, etc. If your PDE has a simple
enough situation that an algebraic approximation is concievable you
can probably generate this algebraic approximation in maxima. I
personally did this using spectral methods for a fluid mechanics
problem and had some success.
--
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan