A computer algebra user interface manifesto

Many computer algebra systems have more than 1000 built-in functions, making expertise difficult. Using mock dialog boxes, this article describes a proposed interactive general-purpose wizard for organizing optional transformations and allowing easy fine grain control over the form of the result even by amateurs. This wizard integrates ideas including: * flexible subexpression selection; * complete control over the ordering of variables and commutative operands, with well-chosen defaults; * interleaving the choice of successively less main variables with applicable function choices to provide detailed control without incurring a combinatorial number of applicable alternatives at any one level; * quick applicability tests to reduce the listing of inapplicable transformations; * using an organizing principle to order the alternatives in a helpful manner; * labeling quickly-computed alternatives in dialog boxes with a preview of their results, * using ellipsis elisions if necessary or helpful; * allowing the user to retreat from a sequence of choices to explore other branches of the tree of alternatives or to return quickly to branches already visited; * allowing the user to accumulate more than one of the alternative forms; * integrating direct manipulation into the wizard; and * supporting not only the usual input-result pair mode, but also the useful alternative derivational and in situ replacement modes in a unified window.Comment: 38 pages, 12 figures, to be published in Communications in Computer Algebr

A Recipe for Symbolic Geometric Computing: Long Geometric Product, BREEFS and Clifford Factorization

In symbolic computing, a major bottleneck is middle expression swell. Symbolic geometric computing based on invariant algebras can alleviate this difficulty. For example, the size of projective geometric computing based on bracket algebra can often be restrained to two terms, using final polynomials, area method, Cayley expansion, etc. This is the "binomial" feature of projective geometric computing in the language of bracket algebra. In this paper we report a stunning discovery in Euclidean geometric computing: the term preservation phenomenon. Input an expression in the language of Null Bracket Algebra (NBA), by the recipe we are to propose in this paper, the computing procedure can often be controlled to within the same number of terms as the input, through to the end. In particular, the conclusions of most Euclidean geometric theorems can be expressed by monomials in NBA, and the expression size in the proving procedure can often be controlled to within one term! Euclidean geometric computing can now be announced as having a "monomial" feature in the language of NBA. The recipe is composed of three parts: use long geometric product to represent and compute multiplicatively, use "BREEFS" to control the expression size locally, and use Clifford factorization for term reduction and transition from algebra to geometry. By the time this paper is being written, the recipe has been tested by 70+ examples from \cite{chou}, among which 30+ have monomial proofs. Among those outside the scope, the famous Miquel's five-circle theorem \cite{chou2}, whose analytic proof is straightforward but very difficult symbolic computing, is discovered to have a 3-termed elegant proof with the recipe

Spherical Universe topology and the Casimir effect

The mode problem on the factored 3--sphere is applied to field theory calculations for massless fields of spin 0, 1/2 and 1. The degeneracies on the factors, including lens spaces, are neatly derived in a geometric fashion. Vacuum energies are expressed in terms of the polyhedral degrees and equivalent expressions given using the cyclic decomposition of the covering group. Scalar functional determinants are calculated and the spectral asymmetry function treated by the same approach with explicit forms on one-sided lens spaces.Comment: 33 pages, 1 figure. Typos corrected and one reference adde