On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 01:43:07PM -0600, Barton Willis wrote:
> 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...
What's wrong with it? Apparently it's useful enough that two different
people have asked for it within a few months.
Perhaps we need a more general collection of functions that perform
newton iterations, into which this could be inserted. For example,
newton iterations on frechet derivatives of differential operators can
be useful for approximate solutions of differential equations...
--
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan