Maxima by Example: Ch. 12 update



Edwin Woollett wrote:

> Maxima by Example, Ch. 12, Dirac Algebra
> and Quantum Electrodynamics update Jan. 10, 2011.

Hi, Edwin

i have just looked at your manuals, and noted a problem i remarked recently,
that you may have not noted in your Chapter 9, use of bfallroots. 

The problem is that if you feed a polynomial with bfloat coefficients  (*) 
to bfallroots, to get the solution, the first thing it does is to convert
all coeffs to rats, and does that with small precision (something like 
eight digits), so you can set fpprec=30 as much as you want the solutions
are not correct to more than 7 digits. 

The solution is to also set ratepsilon=30 before beginning the computation, 
then you get roots correct to around 30 figures. If this appears somewhere 
on your paper i have not seen, please excuse my post.

By the way, your Chapter 12 is really magnificent.

(*) the example i had was with finding roots for a Bethe ansatz, the 
polynomials really has coefficients with a lot of digits, there are huge
order of magnitudes between coeffs, still bfallroots finds correct results
 

-- 
Michel Talon