Just because you can type something in to Maxima does not mean it will
figure out what you meant to do with it.
the limit program does not work on this example because it was not
programmed to compute limits of sums, but of algebraic
expressions in some probably incompletely characterized domain.
You can also try differentiation and you will learn that the
differentiation program does not compute the derivative of the sum with
respect to n.
Should these programs do this? that is a peculiar question since
programs don't really have moral imperatives.
Could someone write a program to do things that Maxima currently cannot
do? Maybe. Maybe you?
Would that make the program better? Maybe, but it might be larger and
slower, and that could be an issue too.
On 8/25/2010 11:35 AM, Ether Jones wrote:
> New Maxima user here. I'm going to swallow my pride and ask this. Sorry if this is obvious, but I've spent about an hour trying different things and looking at examples and reading the docs and I can't figure out how to get Maxima to tell me that the answer to the limit is "1" (and hopefully to show me how it got that answer):
>
> (%i3) limit(sum(1/10^k,k,1, n),n,inf,minus);
> n
> ====
> \ 1
> (%o3) limit> ---
> n -> inf- / k
> ==== 10
> k = 1
> (%i4)
>
>
> Is there a doc somewhere that just contains a gazillion working examples of Maxima's various capabilities?
There are tutorial documents that have examples that DO work.