Commercial macsyma has a pde package, but I suspect that it contains
only some relatively simple general routines,
useful for education primarily.
RJF
Daniel Lakeland wrote:
>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.
>
>
>