Re: Converting result to ASCII-art
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg57046] Re: Converting result to ASCII-art
- From: Paul Abbott <paul at physics.uwa.edu.au>
- Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 22:44:30 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: The University of Western Australia
- References: <d5s978$lid$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
In article <d5s978$lid$1 at smc.vnet.net>, "DJ Craig" <spit at djtricities.com> wrote: > When running MathKernel from command line in OS X, it shows expressions > kind of like ASCII-art. I have a very long equation that I need to > convert to ASCII, but when doing this the way I normally do, using > Terminal and copying and pasting, it comes out looking like a mess, > because it does too much line wrapping. What I am trying to display is > the result of: > Solve[a x^4+b x^3+c x+d==0,x] Why do they need the solution in radicals to a particular quartic? Are they really going to try to use this code to compute the (numerical) solutions to this quartic? If so they will encounter a number of problems (see Ins and Outs in The Mathematica Journal 9-3): [1] In general, radical formulations are prone to numeric problems. Mathematica Root objects, e.g, Root[Function[x, a x^4+b x^3+c x+d], 1] do not have this liability. [2] For certain parameters, the expression involving radicals may involve I, even when the root is real. This means that numeric evaluation will give small imaginary part. In other words, the radical expression is likely to be useless for any practical purpose. In fact, you can avoid it arising by setting SetOptions[Roots, Cubics -> False, Quartics -> False] > What I really need is some way that I can send this result to someone > (who doesn't have Mathematica, MathReader, or any type of MathML > reader), so that they can copy and paste out of it. MathReader is freely available. > when I use Print to create a PDF, the PDF that it creates > can't be read by either Preview or Acrobat. That's strange. Cheers, Paul -- Paul Abbott Phone: +61 8 6488 2734 School of Physics, M013 Fax: +61 8 6488 1014 The University of Western Australia (CRICOS Provider No 00126G) AUSTRALIA http://physics.uwa.edu.au/~paul http://InternationalMathematicaSymposium.org/IMS2005/