Finding maximum value in a domain



On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 11:13 AM, David Neubelt <david at readyatdawn.com> wrote:

> 1) Is there any way to find the maximum of error(x) on a domain?

For a symbolic solution, I don';t know anything better than to
differentiate the function and solve for a root.
For a numerical solution, there is the lbfgs function
(although that might be overkill in this context).

> 2) Is there a way to take samples of a function over a domain and either
> output to a list or possibly a file?

Try this: makelist(foo(x0 + i*dx), i, 1, 10); with suitable x0 and x0 values.

> 3) Other then the documentation is there any recommended readings, i.e. a
> book or a something else that is very beneficial to learning maxima?

There's a lot of tutorial info on the documentation page:
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/documentation.html

Hope this helps,

Robert Dodier