Tag: residue

I’m getting ready for my fall Complex Variables class.  I noticed that the built-in Maxima function residue doesn’t reliably do the right thing.  My goal is to make some improvements to  Maxima residue calculations in Maxima over the course of the next month.

As I started to look at some test cases, I realized I didn’t know how to factor a polynomial into complex factors.  In the simplest case:

but I wanted to see

Maybe someone will find this and let me know that there’s a simple way to make that happen using existing Maxima commands.  Until then, I’ve written a little utility  to identify the roots (both real and complex) of a polynomial and return a factorization.  Here’s an example, and the code.  Notice that it only works as well as the root finder solve.  I tried to upgrade to the more robust to_poly_solve,  but I don’t yet know how to handle multiplicities in that case.

factorC(_f,_z):=block(
[s,n,m,fp,j],
fp:1,
/* This commented code was meant to use the
more robust solver to_poly_solve, but 
I couldn't understand how to handle multiplicities
ss:args(to_poly_solve(_f,_z)),
s:create_list(ss[k][1],k,1,length(ss)),*/
s:solve(_f,_z),
m:multiplicities,
n:length(s),
for j:1 thru n do 
 if lhs(s[j])#0 
 then fp:fp*(_z-(rhs(s[j])))^m[j],
 fp:fp*divide(_f,fp)[1],
fp
);