Solver misses real solutions



On 10/13/13 12:00 PM, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
>
> I'll guess that these are 
> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_irreducibilis, where an exact 
> real solution can only be expressed with complex expressions. For 
> approximate (numeric) results, you can use realroots.
>
>       -s
>
> On Oct 13, 2013 1:12 PM, "Joerg Rauh" <jrgrauh at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:jrgrauh at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>     ("5.28.0-2","2012-08-27 23:16:48","i686-pc-mingw32","GNU Common
>     Lisp (GCL)","GCL 2.6.8")
>
>     Dear Maxima Supporter,
>     out of wxMaxima 12.04.0 I had Maxima solve for x:
>     ((40-3*x)*(20-2*x)*x)/2-500
>     Here are the results:
>     [x=(-(sqrt(3)*%i)/2-1/2)*((250*sqrt(101)*%i)/3^(7/2)+25750/729)^(1/3)+(1300*((sqrt(3)*%i)/2-1/2))/(81*((250*sqrt(101)*%i)/3^(7/2)+25750/729)^(1/3))+70/9,
>     x=((sqrt(3)*%i)/2-1/2)*((250*sqrt(101)*%i)/3^(7/2)+25750/729)^(1/3)+(1300*(-(sqrt(3)*%i)/2-1/2))/(81*((250*sqrt(101)*%i)/3^(7/2)+25750/729)^(1/3))+70/9,
>     x=((250*sqrt(101)*%i)/3^(7/2)+25750/729)^(1/3)+1300/(81*((250*sqrt(101)*%i)/3^(7/2)+25750/729)^(1/3))
>
>     It missed the real results: x=1.7407 and x=6.23415, which I found
>     here:
>     http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve%28%28%2840-3*x%29%2F2%29*%2820-2*x%29*x-500%2Cx%29
>
>     Is there anything I can do differently to make it find the real
>     solutions?
>     Thank you and kind regards
>

try

rectform(%);
bfloat(%);

>     Joerg
>
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