Harald Geyer said:
[about the facexp package documentation and collectterms()]
>"re-arranging forms" means that it takes an expression and returns
> an other but mathematically equivalent expression.
>I think facexp basically does what you want. collectterms()
>is just a special (speed optimized) case of that.
But don't half of the functions in Maxima "take an expression and
return an other but mathematically equivalent expression"? simplify (all
the variations), factor, expand, reduce, and many others. Most of which
I don't know the name of so I cannot guess what might be available.
Richard Fateman suggested rat and ratexpand and sure enough they are
close to what I needed. How does a beginner find the functions that one
needs? The Maxima manual in the Windows version of wxMaxima does not
find any functions when you search on "collect", the index finds only
collectterms (and at first I could not get that to work). Who would have
guessed that typing "rat" to the index would have helped me collect terms?
The manual has a chapter on simplification, I thought this might help.
But this seems to dive down to specifics immediately. As a beginner I
don?t know yet why a function that determines if an expression is an
integer is useful for simplification.
I?ve looked at several tutorials on the WEB and the ones I have seen so
far only give very specific examples. Is there a tutorial or a book
about Maxima that gives a bigger picture? How you can approach problems,
how you find your way through the sea of functions?
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Code in haste, debug at leisure