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Rational

William Fish's picture
Posted on 2008-02-29 10:28 By William Fish (Maple Rating 2 161)
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Why doesn't Maple do what I want in the following:

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Robert Israel's picture

rational

Comment on 2008-02-29 12:00 from Robert Israel (Maple Rating 4 1244)

Because type is (usually) syntactic rather than semantic, i.e. it looks at what the Maple structure of an object is, rather than the mathematical nature of what it represents.  In this case, your expression is not literally an  integer or  a quotient of two integers, so it is not of type rational.  You can, however, use simplify to transform this expression into 2.

 

simplify

Comment on 2008-02-29 12:01 from Joe Riel (Maple Rating 4 1115)

Not sure what you want it to do, but the type function only checks the surface type.  Use simplify:

x := sqrt(2):       
y := (x^x)^x:
simplify(y);                      2
William Fish's picture

Simplify

Comment on 2008-02-29 12:59 from William Fish (Maple Rating 2 161)

Thank you both.  That makes it very clear.

I'll try harder next time.  Some day, I hope to be able to think more like you.  Thanks again.

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