Re: Change of Variables
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg32521] Re: [mg32509] Change of Variables
- From: Mianlai Zhou <lailai at nikhef.nl>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 02:57:51 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, John S wrote: > An even simpler example is the following: > > test=v/c > Replace[test^2,v/c -> beta] > > does not yield beta^2, but rather v^2/c^2. > I guess you should investigate more into the internal structure of Mathematica. It is not so straight-forward as it is often assumed to be - like the mathematical formulae. In fact, if you replace the test^2 in your example to test, it will give beta. But since test^2 gives v^2/c^2, of which the full form is: In[1]:= FullForm[v^2/c^2] Out[1]:= Times[Power[c, -2], Power[v, 2]] While the full form of v/c is Out[2]:= Times[Power[c, -1], v] Apparently they do not match each other. I mean, there is no sub-structure of v/c in the expression v^2/c^2. Therefore, your replacement could not be done. If you really want to do this replacement, you should change the replacement rule to something like v -> c*beta. However, in your original problem, there IS such sub-structure of h*c/(lambda*k*T) in the expression. What you have to do is only, to replace the Replace[] to ReplaceAll[], because ReplaceAll is to transform each subpart of the expression, while Replace is only an attempt to transform the entire expression. Good luck! Mianlai Zhou Theory Group, NIKHEF Amsterdam, the Netherlands