52 lines
2.5 KiB
Text
52 lines
2.5 KiB
Text
Math::Symbolic is intended to offer symbolic calculation capabilities to
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the Perl programmer without using external (and commercial) libraries
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and/or applications.
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Unless, however, some interested and knowledgable developers turn up to
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participate in the development, the library will be severely limited by my
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experience in the area. Symbolic calculations are an active field of
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research in CS.
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There are several ways to construct Math::Symbolic trees. There are no
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actual Math::Symbolic objects, but rather trees of objects of subclasses
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of Math::Symbolic. The most general but unfortunately also the least
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intuitive way of constructing trees is to use the constructors of the
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Math::Symbolic::Operator, Math::Symbolic::Variable, and
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Math::Symbolic::Constant classes to create (nested) objects of the
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corresponding types.
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Furthermore, you may use the overloaded interface to apply the standard
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Perl operators (and functions, see "OVERLOADED OPERATORS") to existing
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Math::Symbolic trees and standard Perl expressions.
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Possibly the most convenient way of constructing Math::Symbolic trees is
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using the builtin parser to generate trees from expressions such as '2 *
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x^5'. You may use the Math::Symbolic->parse_from_string() class method for
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this.
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Of course, you may combine the overloaded interface with the parser to
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generate trees with Perl code such as "$term * 5 * 'sin(omega*t+phi)'"
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which will create a tree of the existing tree $term times 5 times the sine
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of the vars omega times t plus phi.
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There are several modules in the distribution that contain subroutines
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related to calculus. These are not loaded by Math::Symbolic by default.
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Furthermore, there are several extensions to Math::Symbolic availlable
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from CPAN as separate distributions. Please refer to "SEE ALSO" for an
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incomplete list of these.
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For example, Math::Symbolic::MiscCalculus come with Math::Symbolic and
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contains routines to compute Taylor Polynomials and the associated errors.
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Routines related to vector calculus such as grad, div, rot, and Jacobi-
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and Hesse matrices are availlable through the
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Math::Symbolic::VectorCalculus module. This module is also able to compute
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Taylor Polynomials of functions of two variables, directional derivatives,
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total differentials, and Wronskian Determinants.
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Some basic support for linear algebra can be found in
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Math::Symbolic::MiscAlgebra. This includes a routine to compute the
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determinant of a matrix of Math::Symbolic trees.
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WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Math-Symbolic
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Author: Steffen M<>ller <symbolic-module@steffen-mueller.net>
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