Does Sage "Show Its Work"? This seems like a very simple question but am unable to find a definitive answer. If Sage simply evaluates to an answer and doesn't show its work to arrive at this a student would not really learn anything from this.
Sage is open source. A student, or anyone else, can learn how sage computes the answers by reading the source code.
This can even be done interactively, by using the ?? magic. Say you want to learn how the Sylvester matrix of two polynomials is computed. After creating a polynomial object
sage: R.<x> = QQ[](x in this case) you can read the source code of sylvester_matrix() like this
sage: x.sylvester_matrix??Admittedly, this will rarely give you a crystal clear explanation of the algorithm, as most of the time the work is done elsewhere (for example in some C library).
I think the questioner is asking "Can I see the steps whereby sage arrived at this answer?" This is not very well-defined, but in some cases, "showing steps" would be a useful feature.
For example, Wolfram Alpha can do something like this - see http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/09/26/introducing-expanded-step-by-step-math-solutions/ I'll note that the one time I tried to use this feature, WA fell over. :)
Thank you for the reply Luca but Saul summed it up better than I could. A feature that would show the steps would be invaluable. Just evaluating the answer doesn't really help if your trying to help your children do homework.
I think that http://ask.sagemath.org/question/474/... has the answer to your question, which unfortunately is "no". You should consider asking the sage developers this question.
Note that there are various sites on-line that offer homework help. The first that springs to mind is http://math.stackexchange.com/ which states "Mathematics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people studying math at any level".
Asked: 11 years ago
Seen: 633 times
Last updated: Dec 18 '13
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