An "Expand" Tutorial?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg59488] An "Expand" Tutorial?
- From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 02:58:35 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: Stanford University
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Doing algebraic calculations on the Mac (even just to verify hand calculations) can be immensely helpful; but one of the biggest difficulties can be getting Mathematica to express final results in a form that looks something like what a human would want to see. Some of Mathematica's default rules cause it to leave expressions in forms that, viewed by a human analyst, cry out for obvious simplifications, cancellations, or rearrangements. But when one tries to do this, the complications can become even worse. There are I believe at least ten different built-in commands containing the string "Expand" (4 ExpandXxxx's and 6 XxxxExpand's), not all of which cross-reference each other, plus 4 "Factor" commands, two (?) "Simplify" commands, and all the things like ExpToTrig, TrigToExp, Distribute, Apart, Together, Numerator, Denominator, and so on (plus of course all the Options associated with each those). [And I still haven't found the one that will make Exp[a+b+c+...] display as Exp[a] Exp[b] Exp[c] . . . ; or that will cancel out individual exponential factors that may be common to every term in the numerator and denominator of a result.] Is there a good tutorial or an especially complete and definitive book chapter somewhere that gives a unified summary and reference of how to carry out all the algebraic manipulations and simplifications that one might want to convert algebraic output expressions into various different forms? [Or maybe a Palette that would let you select an Output cell and rapidly try any and all possible potentially simplifying manipulations on that cell?]