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kcrisman wrote: I don't know that an "answer" is really appropriate here. It's pretty well-known among power users that symbolic manipulation is something that Maple and Mma do better than Maxima (which provides our simplification). It's unfortunate

Actually this is far more of an answer than I was expecting from an open source project. Thank you very much indeed. I am surely not a power user of sage but I am a power user of mathematica with several tens of thousands of lines of code written for research and teaching in theoretical physics over the years and using it surely not only but definitely also for symbolic manipulation. Actually I didn't even know of sage since very recently a student of mine asked about it. Reading the "Tour of Sage" and the "Tutorial" in the docs and the frequently reoccurring benchmarks against mathematica in other parts of the docs, I was mislead to think ".. wow this might be an open source replacement ..". So it played around with sage in my spare time, attempting just some very 1st and trivial things.

Some of my related questions you can find in this forum. I learned, stuff like: sage can't get elementary functions like the log() straight, or, plotting more than just the cos() gets you into trouble, and now I read that I should not use sage for symbolic manipulations.

So yes, you gave an answer - one which will also help my students (which can have their university licenses of mathematica for free anyway).

kcrisman wrote: I don't know that an "answer" is really appropriate here. It's pretty well-known among power users that symbolic manipulation is something that Maple and Mma do better than Maxima (which provides our simplification). It's unfortunate

Actually this is far more of an answer than I was expecting from an open source project. Thank you very much indeed. I am surely not a power user of sage but I am a power user of mathematica with several tens of thousands of lines of code written for research and teaching in theoretical physics over the years and using it surely not only but definitely also for symbolic manipulation. Actually I didn't even know of sage since very recently a student of mine asked about it. Reading the "Tour of Sage" and the "Tutorial" in the docs and the frequently reoccurring benchmarks against mathematica in other parts of the docs, I was mislead to think ".. wow this might be an open source replacement ..". So it played around with sage in my spare time, attempting just some very 1st and trivial things.

Some of my related questions you can find in this forum. I learned, stuff like: sage can't get elementary functions like the log() straight, or, plotting more than just the cos() gets you into trouble, and now I read that I should not use sage for symbolic manipulations.

So yes, you gave an answer - one which will also help my students (which can have their university licenses of mathematica for free anyway).