Thanks Richard,
One reason for factoring out the Maxima code into a separate package is to
enable comment and possible collaboration. I appreciate that simp:false
is not the best approach here. It would be an interesting project to put
these functions on a sound CS basis.
Chris
On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, Richard Fateman wrote:
> On 12/2/2010 12:52 AM, Chris Sangwin wrote:...
>
> ...
>>
>> The library I have written already does these sorts of things. I know how
>> difficult Maxima can be with simp:false. I've battled against it quietly
>> for the last 5 years! And it now mostly works very well. 1000s of
>> students are using these functions everyday and having useful feedback
>> provided to their online quizzes. See
>> http://web.mat.bham.ac.uk/C.J.Sangwin/Publications/2010-3-1-STACK.pdf
>
> I'm impressed by this -- it is far more sophisticated than I thought! (Some
> examples' English is kind of stilted. Finnish-English translation?).
>
> The major difficulty appears to be getting various systems to work together,
> and to get material from other
> sources (e.g. MapleTA) to work with STACK, too.
>
> Still, running Maxima with the simplifier off, and then perhaps turning
> it on in bursts, does not seem to match what you really need. Given
> that, it is interesting that you were able to do so much.
>
> It is, I think, important to realize that one (perhaps the only?)
> plausible "killer app" for computer algebra systems is "math education".
> There are far more calculus or pre-calculus students than researchers
> using advanced math. And at least some of those researchers combine
> unfortunate traits: obstinate+unwilling to read documentation +
> unwilling to pay [ to support further development or commercialization
> etc.]
>
> RJF
>
> PS, I remember seeing an interactive system to teach Lisp. I don't know if
> it ever worked for students,
> but I found it irritating because the solutions that I offered to the
> questions were graded wrong
> because I wrote more advanced solutions than the grading program
> anticipated.
>
>
>