Skip to main content
Mathematica

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

10
  • $\begingroup$ It does not seem to be true saying: "I've now encountered expressions that aren't being meaningfully simplified" like if you encountered it by a chance. Rather it seems that the expression was constructed artificially for the purpose so that Mathematica fails at simplifying it. It is easy to construct such expressions. Start with simple expression then manipulate it so that it becomes convoluted but still numerically same as the original. You end up with a complicated expression that is hard to simplify to the original form if you do not know the steps that were made to make it complicated. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ It is like mixing tea and milk together and then demanding to separate them. The former is easy the latter is hard, if not impossible. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
  • $\begingroup$ I've used Mathematica do get compact expressions for some very nasty tensor calculus, but the trick there was to not take immediate advantage of the simplification engine, in fact I barely used it at all. Instead I allowed Mathematica to manipulate compound expressions, e.g. I could multiply A**F where A and F stood in for some more complicated expression, and then I supplied some general simplification rules for my specific tensors, and only after the main classes of simplifications were handled did I expand things back out to simplify. This is, generally, a hard problem for any CAS $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
  • $\begingroup$ @azerbajdzan I promise I absolutely was not trying to set up a simplification failure. The example expression came directly from a personal project where I am attempting to find the coordinates of the center-point of a circle in 3D space by following this post. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
  • $\begingroup$ @Lawton So maybe you should have written it in OP as there may be easier way to simplify it if we know where the problem came from. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday