| | Game-playing students (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13) |
 | | A typical pitfall for the student is to discover that Maple (or AXIOM or whatever) can solve matrix systems with symbolic entries, and then to attempt to use first-year linear algebra concepts such as matrix inverses to solve problems with lots of parameters. |
 | | For example, a general three-by-three matrix system has nine parameters, and each entry in its adjugate is a combination of four of these parameters; the determinant has 6 terms each containing three parameters. |
 | | Many students (and faculty) get annoyed when the computer `goes away' when they ask it to find the symbolic inverse of, say, an eight-by-eight system, little dreaming that it is they who are being unreasonable, because the size of the answer grows more than exponentially with the dimension of the problem. |
| oldweb.cecm.sfu.ca /publications/organic/rutgers/node16.html (443 words) |