poly of pow 2



maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu wrote on 11/28/2007 11:56:25 AM:

> Barton,
> I remembered this mail about your sfactor but I thought it was long 
> time ago and I hoped that meanwhile it would be built in. 

Algorithmically, sfactor is Newton iteration over
polynomials, I guess. I'm hesitant to place sfactor into
contrib because I don't know how to explain what
it does other than "it sometimes expresses a polynomial
as a sum of squares plus a remainder."  And that's not
satisfactory. If anybody knows a good algorithm...

BW