A Different Look at Polynomials within Man-Machine Interaction

Abstract

Undoubtedly, one of the most powerful applications that allow symbolic computations is Wolfram Mathematica. However, it turns out that sometimes Mathematica does not give the desired result despite its continuous improvement. Moreover, these gaps are not filled by many authors of books and tutorials. For example, our attempts to obtain a compact symbolic description of the roots of polynomials or coefficients of a polynomial with known roots using Mathematica have often failed and they still fail. Years of our work with theory, computations, and different kinds of applications in the area of polynomials indicate that an application ‘offering’ the user alternative methods of solving a given problem would be extremely useful. Such an application would be valuable not only for people who look for solutions to very specific problems but also for people who need different descriptions of solutions to known problems than those given by classical methods. Therefore, we propose the development of an application that would be not only a program doing calculations but also containing an interactive database about polynomials. In this paper, we present examples of methods and information which could be included in the described project.

Keywords

• Chebyshev polynomials
• nonegative polynomials
• Littlewood’s polynomials
• Barker’s polynomials
• computing over polynomials