Dear Richard, Thank you for pointing out an issue with notmalisation of expressions. What about the attached _draft_ of the patch? It allows to reduce all suitable exponents with arguments different by a rational numeric factor to monomials of the same temporary variable. Thus it reduces (exp(2*x)-1)/(exp(x)-1) to exp(x)+1 as well as other more complicated cases like (exp(15*x)+exp(12*x)+2*exp(10*x)+2*exp(7*x))/(exp(5*x)+exp(2*x)) to exp(5*x)^2+2*exp(5*x) The patch modifies some signatures of functions, which however are not advertised as user interface. A footprint on the performance with expressions without exponents shall not be really noticeable. If the approach is suitable I can add a similar behaviour for powers, then the simplification (a^(2x)-1)/(a^x-1) to a^x+1 will work as well. Some tests shall be added for the final version of the patch. Once this will be working, shall we add the automatic simplification (a^b)^c=a^(b*c) for suitable cases as well? Best wishes, Vladimir -- Vladimir V. Kisil http://www.maths.leeds.ac.uk/~kisilv/ Book: Geometry of Mobius Transformations http://goo.gl/EaG2Vu Software: Geometry of cycles http://moebinv.sourceforge.net/ Jupyter: https://github.com/vvkisil/MoebInv-notebooks
On Thu, 9 Apr 2020 01:51:09 +0200, "Richard B. Kreckel" <kreckel@in.terlu.de> said:
RK> Hi Vladimir! RK> On 06.04.20 14:34, Vladimir V. Kisil wrote: >> Coming back to our previous discussion (with a long history) on >> the power law (e^x)^a=e^(x*a). I am attaching a patch which does >> not break the automatic simplification exp(x)/exp(x)=1. RK> Your new patch is much better since it doesn't break any RK> existing test suite. RK> Playing around with it, it still seems to raise some fundamental RK> questions: What justifies treating exp(x)^a fundamentally RK> different than any other (b^x)^a with a (positive) base b? With RK> the patch, there seems to be this discrimination: exp(x)^5 is RK> rewritten to exp(5*x) but (b^x)^5 is _not_ rewritten to b^(5*x). RK> It's a nice pastime to fancy consequences of this. Let y=b^x, RK> then normal((y^2-1)/(y+1)) returns b^x-1. But if y=exp(x), the RK> patch prevents the normalization to exp(x)-1. Ugh. RK> Or, consider this gedankenexperiment: If we didn't have exp(x) RK> as a function but instead a symbol e, would it be justified to RK> have special re-writing rules for (e^x)^a but not for (b^x)^a? RK> I'm not sure... RK> Best wishes, -richy. -- Richard B. Kreckel RK> <https://in.terlu.de/~kreckel/>