On 10/27/11, Panagiotis Papasotiriou <p.j.papasot at gmail.com> wrote:
> Apparently, what is missing is Maxima's symbolic computations (although I
> wonder how a statistician could really need that as well.)
Well, I'd like to see stuff like this: compute the mean / variance / etc
of [a, b, c] where a, b, and c are symbols, intervals, objects which
represent some special-purpose implementation (e.g. multiple precision
numbers), expressions like 2 i + 3 j - 4 k, dimensional quantities
(feet, meters, etc), or ordinary numbers, or combinations thereof.
Or this: given some kind of model, derive a maximum likelihood
estimator for parameters of the model, and express that as a formula
or a function to compute a numerical approximation.
I got into Maxima originally because I was writing a program which
computed some cumulative probabilities in passing, and for that I
wanted to calculate some integrals.
best
Robert Dodier