On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Carter, Nathan <NCARTER at bentley.edu> wrote:
>> This is an I took a look at your lurch.sourceforge.net page, and I
>> wonder why you want to use maxima to verify your answers. It seems that
>> you want to verify your equations, not provide solutions to mathematical
>> problems. Thus, you want to check equations like
>> (x+1)^2 = x^2+2*x +1
>
> Yes, that's right. We want to ask if two expressions are equivalent,
> among other things. If the only option for doing so is plugging in lots of
> random values, I can do that, but I kind of hoped Maxima, as a CAS,
> would be able to do something more sophisticated.
Yes, Maxima can do something more sophisticated.
e.g. is(ratsimp(rhs(e) - lhs(e)) = 0). However, bear in mind that it is not
too hard to construct examples for which equivalence is very difficult
to determine, e.g. something with a lot of radicals.
Maxima has a function zeroequiv which tries to determine equivalence.
Maybe it's useful to you; I don't know much about it.
best
Robert Dodier