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I have recently encoutered 2 errors with Mathcad's symbolic solver

davidsnelling
2-Explorer

I have recently encoutered 2 errors with Mathcad's symbolic solver

Has anyone seen similar behaviour to that shown in the attached Mathcad sheet? I am losing confidence with the Mathcad 15 symbolic solver and don't know how to proced. Any suggestions or comments are welcome.

I wish PTC put more of their resources in improving the symbolic server and ensuring graphics output is report ready. It is tedious and time consuming to have to export data to more capable plotting programs.

I do not see tha Prime is going to be a significant improvement over Mathcad 15 and it will seemingly require our reseach group to convert tens of GB's of existing Mathcad files and learn a new program. I admit to being ignorant about the capabilities of Prime and am ready to be corrected.

Dave Snelling

20 REPLIES 20

Interestingly, I have a complex solution whether I'm integrating with or without the Tgas/Tflow term.

How's the following for a work-around?

Untitled.png

Very interesting Roger. I wonder why does changing the constant terms works?

I second that. Conversion is a crucial feature that has to work and to work seamlessly.

It's beyond me why PTC appears to write code without bothering to listen to users. In their advertisement they seem to ignore that the cases they're making for MathCad Prime are all cases for MC15 but not Prime!

Raiko

I guess there is nothing we can do Raiko other than continuing to point out how PTC's Mathcad development is impacting users.

david snelling wrote:

I guess there is nothing we can do Raiko other than continuing to point out how PTC's Mathcad development is impacting users.

Sad but true and there is only a very, very dim chance that this will change anything, I fear.

BTW, I played again with your integral and tried to simplify it to track down the problem. While I wqas able to reproduce the effect with a more simple integrand even without that additive constant, I encountered some strange effects during my attempts. Sometimes changing simple things like a variable name would make the i disappear but on relading the sheet it was there again. I also found two workarounds for my simplified example which both did not work on your original integrand.

One way which works for your integral, too, is to separately calculate numerator and denominator and then put both together. Thats somewhat more elaborate than the way with using Re() showed in my earlier post so I would prefer the latter.

02.10.png

Interesting Werner, but I have no insights into what is going on. I will get back to my original problem and proceed with caution with symbolic solver.

Good luck!

Hi Werner, I was trying to check a symbolic integration by differentiating the result to see if mathcad recovered the original expression. On my computer the symbolic solve would not recognise that C3=1 in the attached. Am IUm missing something?

The order of the symbolic keywords sometimes matter.

If you solve first and then simplify you get your 1. The assume,ALL=real (I think ALL must be written in uppercase) is not necessary here.

Symbolics sometimes is a trial and error.

Good solve. I had fallen into the habit of putting simplify first because technical support at PTC (The Kan of Dave_Kan) had shown that doing so had solved a different problem.

The Mathcad solver is becoming more of an art than a science. I will send your solution to PTC support for their comments.

The Mathcad solver is becoming more of an art than a science.

How true!

If you put a "simplify" additionally on top the solve fails again.

So to look whats going wrong I tried "simplify" alone, copied the resulting equation and did a "solve,C3" on it. Bingo, I get 1 without problems. Not understandable, I guess - it quite a cumbrous art.

I agree with your feelings about Prime not being an improvement so far and that jumping off the MC15 bus and converting old valuable worksheets (many of them won't work anymore) is not an option yet.

Concerning symbolics - Mathcad always was known as an all purpose program with a nice user interface (I am speaking of MC15 and below, not Prime), but there always where programs with better symbolics or programs with better numerics available (but then you would have to go without units or without the wordprocessor like layout, etc.). So symbolics ever was an addon not created by the makers of Mathcad. Older versions used a subset of Maple to do the symbolic evaluations and when Mathsoft changed that and included a subset of muPad instead (one of the few things you cannot blame PTC for) it got worse in many respects, better in some others. Looking at Prime it doesn't seem realistic to me that PTC would be able and willing to spend the ressources necessary to develop its own symbolic engine as you suggested.

Concerning your problem: No! Mathcad does not give you an imaginary solution as you wrote in your file. Just because an expression contains the imaginary unit does not mean its imaginary itself. Mathcad simply had decided that its simplified enough (I also tried "simplify,max" without success). So either Mathcad "thinks" that eliminating the imaginary unit would make the expression less simply or its not capable enough to do so (as seems to be the case here, because the real representation of the solution is shorter/simpler). In contrary to Maple muPad defaults to deomain complex and does not consider an imaginary unit as something bad or unusual

You can verify that its a real solution by taking the imaginary part of your calculation which Mathcads simplifies correctly to zero.

Taking the real part seems to give you the solution in the form you expected.

02.10.png

Werner, I will try your interesting solution with future symbolic problems. I had realized that the term was not necessarily imaginary because it had imaginary components in it. I had even tried selecting the complex result and calculating the imaginary component of it, but got no result.

I tried the solution you had for the integral problem on the non integral problem, but got a “No solution found” for the imaginary part and a “The symbolic solution is too large to display....” for the real part.

You evidently know more about the symbolic solvers than I do, but isn’t Maple a more robust and capable system than MuPad? I never had these problems with the symbolic solver when Mathcad used Maple, although to be fair I may be trying to solve more complex equations with MuPad.

muPad sure is not that bad but most experienced long term users consider Maple to be the better of the two. But thats history and it does not look we will get any better in the near (and also not so near) future.

RichardJ
19-Tanzanite
(To:Werner_E)

I get the exact same answer whether or not I use Re.

As an aside, using the "rectangular" keyword often forces Mathcad to eliminate the imaginary part.

Werner_E
25-Diamond I
(To:RichardJ)

Hmm, rectangular does the job - even better than Re(). But only if put at the end. If put on top i get an error.

Evaluating without Re() or rectangular yields the imaginary unit. See pdf (its A0 landscape!)

RichardJ
19-Tanzanite
(To:Werner_E)

Strange. I just tried it again, and now I get the imaginary part. I'm going mad!

Werner_E
25-Diamond I
(To:RichardJ)

Richard Jackson wrote:

Strange. I just tried it again, and now I get the imaginary part. I'm going mad!

David seems to be right - roulette!

I think one outcome of this posting is that using Mathcad's symbolic solver can be like spinning a roulette wheel.

Faites vos jeux!

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