On Nov 19, 2007 9:24 AM, Rogers, Raymond
<raymond-rogers at idexx.com> wrote:
You might try implementing Newton-Raphson....
<http://numericalmethods.eng.usf.edu/ebooks/newtonraphson_03nle_ebook.ht
m> I'm really surprised that Maxima doesn't have a package to do this.
Maxima has a variety of documented numerical solving routines.
If you're looking for Newton method, try
?? newton
at the command line, which documents naive univariate
Newton-Raphson (newton) and multivariate Newton-Raphson ( mnewton). The
query
?? root
will show find_root, a combination of binary search and
Newton-Raphson which works for a larger variety of functions, realroots,
which uses Sturm sequences for univariate polynomials (real_root),
allroots for complex roots of polynomials. And so on.
Why doesn't solve use any of these methods? Because Maxima is
primarily a *symbolic* system, so solve looks for closed-form symbolic
solutions.
-s
Sorry, my mistake. I did a superficial search and it wasn't through
enough.
RRogers