On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:14 PM, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu>wrote:
> try expand(trigsimp(trigexpand( sqrt(b^2+a^2)*sin(x+atan(b/a)) )));
>
but that is in the reverse direction.
>
This proves the equality, but as you say doesn't perform the transformation
the user wants to perform.
> Your notion of simplification is more like complification.
>
No, it is more like "transformation" to another form. And a useful
transformation. I can't think of a straightforward way to perform this
transformation in general in Maxima; I don't think the pattern matcher is
powerful enough to find the appropriate subexpression of, e.g.
a*sin(q)+b*cos(r)+c*cos(q)
without explicitly being told it is looking for terms in sin/cos(q).
-s