Dear Maxima Users,
I came across a problem with vector simplification (using maxima 5.25.1, I have problems with maxima 5.26). For products of a scalar and a vector, it depends on the length of the scalar expression, if it is distributed over the vector or not.
E.g. with a 5 element denominator I get
(%i1) [x,y,z]/(a+b+c+d+e);
(%o1) [x/(e+d+c+b+a),y/(e+d+c+b+a),z/(e+d+c+b+a)]
And with a 6 element denominator I get
(%i2) [x,y,z]/(a+b+c+d+e+f);
(%o2) [x,y,z]/(f+e+d+c+b+a)
I found no way to expand such a vector*scalar expression, e.g. expand, vectorsimp with expandall:true don't work. This is especially inconvenient when I want to retrieve an element of the vector as in
(%i3) ([x,y,z]/(a+b+c+d+e))[1];
(%o3) x/(e+d+c+b+a)
but
(%i4) ([x,y,z]/(a+b+c+d+e+f))[1];
(%o4) ([x,y,z]/(f+e+d+c+b+a))[1]
Is there a way of doing this without writing my own function for this?
Thanks & best regards,
Michael