(more lj than gp)

It seems like I mostly just worked on physics homework tonight. I'm past the hard core classes where a symbolic calculator really would have helped, but I'm putting them to good use regardless.

I found that none of my earlier quartic programs were stable in all cases; plus, I ran it on an emulator, and it ran out of memory when trying to evaluate it symbolically. So earlier today I just had Mathematica solve the quartic equation, and copied the solution (only the first one so far, but I think I can get the others just by copying and changing the signs on some square roots) directly (except that I used variables to store repeated terms) into the HP49G+.

It seems like that might be the best solution. So far, it can't solve x^4+4x^3+6x^2+4x+1=0 (which has -1 as a quadruple root) because it leads to dividing by zero. But that doesn't bother me, because I should be able to work a contingency in. The question for me was, is it a stable solution? Well, it *HAS* given the correct solution (to many decimal places) to the slightly different problem x^4+4x^3+(6.00001)x^2+4x+1=0, which involves dividing by a small but nonzero number, so I think (so far) that it's stable.

I don't think I'll ever worry about putting such a thing on the TI89. Without an equation writer, it would just take forever to type in, and would be too error prone.

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
-Orwell