Subject: Simplifications of 3*sqrt(2)/sqrt(3)/sqrt(6)
From: Raymond Toy
Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:35:29 -0400
Dieter Kaiser wrote:
[nice examples snipped]
> The idea is to factor an integer which is the base of a mexpt-expression
> and multiply the factored form into the list of products. I do not know
> if this method is the fastest way to get the factors of an integer. But
> the code is only called a few times within the testsuite and
> share_testsuite and therefore the much better simplified results might
> overweight the effort to get the factors.
>
> One change of the behavior of Maxima is, that we always get more
> factored results, e.g.
>
> (%i6) sqrt(6);
> (%o6) sqrt(2)*sqrt(3)
>
> (%i14) sqrt(10);
> (%o14) sqrt(2)*sqrt(5)
>
> and no longer sqrt(6) or sqrt(10).
>
> Any comments?
Not sure. The other examples you presented are probably what I would
like. But I'm not so sure that I would want sqrt(6) to be factored into
sqrt(2)*sqrt(3). But I would like sqrt(6)/sqrt(3) to be simplified to
sqrt(2). Perhaps these are conflicting desires on my part.
And I think always calling factor for these cases may not be such a good
idea. What if the number is the product of two fairly large primes or
even a prime? Maxima will spend a lot of time trying to find the factors.
Ray