[Scilab-users] Symbolic computation in Scilab

[Tim Wescott]

On Thu, 2015-08-13 at 04:41 -0700, duce wrote:
> Thank you for your reply. Currently, I am trying to figure my way through
> Maxima to get it to do what i need for my project. 
> Anyway, there is a toolbox for that, and it's called Scimax. Here is the
> link http://forge.scilab.org/index.php/p/scimax/ 
> It's for Linux only. Problem is, I really can't install it properly, since
> it requires some other toolbox called Overload and i really can't manage to
> install it since I'm not too skilled with Ubuntu. If someone could explain
> on how to install this on on Ubuntu, it would be a perfect solution for the
> problem. 
> Thank you again

Unless you have some external requirement for doing everything within
Scilab, I strongly suggest that you use Maxima by itself.  

If you're a beginning user, try WxMaxima.  It makes using Maxima
considerably easier -- it basically wraps Maxima with a shell that lets
you point & click for solutions.

Maxima (and, for that matter Maple, which is its commercial counterpart)
does not do as well as a human being on really difficult or intricate
problems: there are some things that I try on it that I know have
solutions that Maxima simply cannot find.  Far more often, there are
simplifications that I know are out there that I cannot coerce Maxima to
express.

I have, however, found that if all you can get out of Maxima is
something really complicated and you suspect that it has a much more
convenient form, you can try

<maxima's really complicated thing> - <your candidate form>;

If Maxima hurks up '0', then you know that your candidate form is
correct.

-- 

Tim Wescott
www.wescottdesign.com
Control & Communications systems, circuit & software design.
Phone: 503.631.7815
Cell:  503.349.8432