On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 9:39 AM, David Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > I could live with nthroot -- but is cuberoot (or curt or cbrt) so different > from sqrt?
Cubic roots are much less common. They don't even have their own (unparameterized) symbol. I think some kind of a (real?) nth root function makes sense. > Anyway, it would be nice to have functions that resemble ones > students see routinely without generating error messages. I'm very much > aware of the difficulties involved in reaching that goal, and I'll be > patient. > > Still waiting for a solution on arcsec, as well. There the issue is > primarily plotting, although "integral" fails, even with a proper domain. > numerical_integral works as it should. > > In the great scheme of things, these are certainly peripheral issues -- and > they wouldn't be issues at all if textbook authors didn't feel obliged to > drag in every function they know about. As author, I'll guilty of that too > (fear of the adoption committee), but in my defense, we only do these things > in exercises. It might not hurt to include a script for your students to copy/import that makes common definitions you want. > On Wednesday, June 18, 2014 8:48:36 PM UTC-4, kcrisman wrote: >> >> Just to chime in, as someone who has dealt with this question a lot >> (though, perhaps ironically, never in a classroom situation): >> >> I would be very against a "cuberoot" function, but an "nthroot" function >> where it was really clear what input was allowed could fly. I appreciate >> Greg's rationale. Note however - what is the 0.1 power? Is that the same as >> the 1/10 power? This is a tricky floating point question to interpret. >> >> I don't think that the slowdown would be too bad since it would primarily >> be for pedagogical purposes for plotting. >> >> David, I don't know how this would work with integrals, though - we'd have >> to see if Maxima had something equivalent. Perhaps it could do a temporary >> set of the Maxima domain to real somehow, if that is what allows Maxima to >> do the "right thing" in this context, I don't know. >> >> Thanks for fighting the good fight on trying to resolve this once and for >> all! >> - kcrisman > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-edu" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
