Greetings list
I'm still getting used to this, but I've been lurking a while and
now I have to start doing basic college first year calc. I'm
working up to Stochastic processes later in the year.
I'll do it in Mathematica if I need to but I'd rather use your
package, it suits me better.
I'm getting to grips with parts and equation manipulation, so I
tryed this, prove eqn1 converges to root n for x > 0:
eqn1 : (1/2)*(x + (n/x)) = 0$
eqn1 : eqn1*2$
eqn1 : eqn1 - part(part(eqn1, 1), 1)$
eqn1 : eqn1^2$
eqn1 : eqn1 * part(part(eqn1, 1), 2)$
eqn1 : eqn1^(1/4)$
eqn1;
And I get something that can be written in c as sqrt(n) == abs(x)
Fair enough
I also got rid of the abs by doing
assume(n > 0, x > 0);
which is fine cause my case allows it.
So having proved this 'manually' I want to try and get solve to
do it automatically.
But when I do this:
assume(n>0)$
eqn2 : (1/2)*(x + (n/x)) = 0$
soln : solve(eqn2, x)$
soln;
I get [ -%i*n^(1/2), %i*n^(1/2) ]
What am I missing, if I can manipulate the expression around to
be what I thought, then these 2 expressions should be the same,
but they aren't what am I missing.
PS wxMaxima should support copy and paste from the interface, it
seems broken on my Gentoo system. wxMaxima 0.7.4, Maxima 5.14.0
all build with recent libs as at 1 March.
TIA and sorry for a long post.
Any ideas on any of this are appreciated.
rgrieve at cs.otago.ac.nz