Tsk.

August 16th, 2009 by ben

This post will be filled with random rants about random things. Stay tuned for a more meaningful post.

Contents: Mathematica, quintics, WordPress, LaTeX, and stuff in between.

Technology is too complicated.

I mean, most of the complicatedness is not really needed. Otherwise I wouldn’t be complaining.

Mathematica is an awesome program (epic, in fact), and I they did a nice job of simplifying things. I was just playing with it a couple minutes ago. It’s easy to do the simple things, but some of the more complex functions require some jumble of code and weirdly-named functions.

Also, it can’t solve quintics. Well, there’s no quintic formula. But still, it should be able to solve

$x^5 = 1$

and give me a solution at least better than

$\left\{1, -(-1)^\frac{1}{5}, 1^\frac{2}{5}, -(-1)^\frac{3}{5}, 1^\frac{4}{5}\right\}$

(Obviously I’m smart enough to know that the solutions are the 5th roots of unity…)

There’s probably some complexicated function that will simplify that into rectangular/polar complex numbers for me, but like heck I have enough time to figure out how.

Also, if I tell it some human-factorable quintic or something, can’t it at least partially factor it for me?

Oh, and LaTeX on WordPress is AWESOME. Every single day I appreciate the power and simplicity of WordPress more. I <3 WordPress.

… but I’m still not gonna donate =p