From help-request at octave dot org Sun Feb 6 20:38:43 2005 Subject: Re: two quadratic eq, please help From: Mike Miller To: Vic Norton cc: Help-Octave List Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 20:36:51 -0600 (CST) On Sun, 6 Feb 2005, Vic Norton wrote: > So we have proved that a quadratic equation can have two solutions. I > will really be impressed if octave can find more than two! ;-) > > My question is this. Why should one bother using a high powered > numerical language for an elementary exercise? > > This is a philosophical point. Personally I believe it is important to > recognize trivialities, no matter the power of the machinery you have at > hand. Two circles can intersect in two points, one point, or they might > not intersect at all. That is all we are talking about here. Anybody > with a hand calculator should be able to figure out where these two > circles intersect (if they intersect at all). To hell with high level > numerical languages. You never know why someone submits something to the list. Often they have simplified their question so that it will be easy to answer, then they construct their needed answer from what we give them. I have no idea if the guy with the two circles had just that one problem to solve. Maybe he has thousands of sets of equations to solve. We still need high-level languages even when we can solve things by hand. Anyway, I appreciated the intro to fsolve. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------