On 11/23/10, Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:
> If you bring everything to a canonical form in terms of ordered
> monomials (PBW) then you know that there is unicity of such
> presentation, hence you can ascertain if two apparently
> different expressions are equal or different. The price you pay is that you
> don't see commutators in the end result. The second problem, as expressed by
> Leo is that you don't use the expression of the commutator in terms of
> degree one objects (the expression with structure constants) so this
> computation doesn't know anyhing about the Lie algebra structure in fact.
I don't have any opinions about how to work with Lie algebras;
I was just trying to encode in Maxima some identities that someone
else brought up. If you have a different approach, please, by all means,
tell me about it, (and by this I mean, state the identities you'd like
Maxima to know) and I'll try to figure out how to do that in Maxima.
> Finally may i venture another comment, this bunch of posts clearly show how
> the inline documentation of the rules system is deficient. It would be
> invaluable if people like you who know how the rules system works in Maxima
> really explained the things in the inline doc.
Too late -- I wrote the documentation for matchdeclare and tellsimpafter.
I tried to be as precise and complete as possible; unfortunately the
rules system has a few idiosyncrasies.
> At the moment it is complete gibbersish for the uninitiated,
> that one at most try to decipher by trial and error.
Sorry. I did my best. <shrug>
Robert Dodier