Re: Why does Reduce work this way ...?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg67234] Re: [mg67225] Why does Reduce work this way ...?
- From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl>
- Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 06:28:36 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <200606130507.BAA23801@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
On 13 Jun 2006, at 14:07, jackgoldberg at comcast.net wrote: > Hi folks, > > This post is related to a previous series of posts about ReplaceAll > in a set of inequalities. > I have "reduced" the problem to this unexpected situation: > > In[1] FullForm[-3<=x<=1] > Out[1] LessEqual[-3,x,1] > > In[2] Reduce[-3<=x<=1] > Out[2] -3<=x<=1 > > In[3] FullForm[%2] > Out[3] Inequality[-3, LessEqual, y, LessEqual, 1] > > In[4] Reduce[ LessEqual[-3,x,1] > Out[4] -3 ≤ x ≤ 1 > > In[5] FullForm[%4] > Out[5] Inequality[-3, LessEqual, y, LessEqual, 1] > > This defies my understanding. What is qoing on with Reduce? > > Jack > Mathematica has a (not very well documented) function Inequality which can be used to express complicated inequalities in a compact form; for example: In[8]:= Inequality[a, Less, b, Less, c] Out[8]= a < b < c In[9]:= Inequality[a, Greater, b, Less, c] Out[9]= a > b && b < c In[10]:= Inequality[a, Greater, b, Less, c, Equal, d] Out[10]= a > b && Inequality[b, Less, c, Equal, d] In[11]:= Inequality[a, Less, b, LessEqual, c] Out[11]= Inequality[a, Less, b, LessEqual, c] As you can see, sometimes these functions reduce to a simpler form, like a < b < c, which has FullForm: Less[a,b,c] and sometimes not. The forms LessEqual[a,b,c] and Inequality[a,LessEqual,b,LessEqual,c] are semantically equivalent (and have the same but syntactically distinct but normally they evaluate to themselves. The relation between them is a little unusual; note than using the Cell:Convert To menu (in other words the FrontEnd) and converting Inequality [a,LessEqual,b,LessEqual,c] to StandardForm or to TraditionalForm will result in Less[a,b,c] but doing this: In[12]:= Inequality[a,Less,b,Less,c]//StandardForm Out[12]//StandardForm= a<b<c In[13]:= FullForm[%] Out[13]//FullForm= Inequality[a,Less,b,Less,c] does not. Note than the Inequality form is much more general than forms with Heads Less, Greater, LessEqual etc, which I think is the reason why Reduce often returns expressions with head Inequality . If you find this a problem you can always use LogicalExpand@Reduce instead of Reduce, which will take longer and give you a more complex answer but which, I think, will not contain any expressions with Head Inequality. Andrzej Kozlowski
- References:
- Why does Reduce work this way ...?
- From: jackgoldberg@comcast.net
- Why does Reduce work this way ...?