On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > On 5/3/2011 2:29 AM, Gregory Ewing wrote: >> >> Terry Reedy wrote: >>> >>> The trick is that replacing x with j and evaluating therefore causes >>> (in Python) all the coefficients of x (now j) to be added together >>> separately from all the constant terms to reduce the linear equation >>> to a*x+b (= 0 implied). >> >> Hmmm... so if we used quaternions, could we solve systems >> of linear equations in 3 variables? > > Yes and no. The use of 1*j merely collected and added together all the > multipliers of 'x' (and all the constant terms). That is a fairly trivial > matter of constant folding. Systems of linear equations are usually > presented in that form already. The actual solution to the simple equation > is in the formula x = -a/b (where a and b are the sums). The solution > formula for three variables would be far more complex.
Or just use a gauss-jordan solver, which has the advantage of being easy to explain and possible to verify by hand on small instances. Geremy Condra -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
