Differential equations

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Wed Dec 11 19:07:50 EST 2002


Fernando Pérez wrote:

> Well, it's not compute-intensive, but the code needs to be written :)
> And as I
> said, while a symbolic differentiator is not a _fundamentally_
> difficult
> problem, making sure that all the details are done right can be
 tricky.

As you say, it's pretty straightforward to write a program that does
symbolic differentiation.  What really gets into the hairy stuff is when
you want to simplify the resulting functions, which you inevitably want
to do after you look at the output of a straighforward implementation of
a symbolic differentiator.

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