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As far as vector calculus goes, I find these functions cover (most) of what I (usually) need: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/VectorAnalysis.html ht

by qubex 8y ago

As far as vector calculus goes, I find these functions cover (most) of what I (usually) need: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/VectorAnalysis.html http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/VectorAnalysis.h... When it gets to Tensor Calculus though it’s literally back to the blackboard to cry tears of blood.

gh02t 8y ago
Yeah I'm aware, they're just limited. My problem is that they are focused on component-wise manipulation. There's not a good way to do symbolic manipulation of generic vectors/matrices/tensors AFAIK. It's improved though and you can now do some useful things with it- the vector calculus related tools used to be in an external module and truly barely worked. Edit: the same applies to tensors. Mathematica is actually pretty elegant for working with concrete tensors IMO, but kinda sucks for symbolic manipulation. Not that it's an easy problem to solve. It's like that with pretty much every CAS and I think it will be a while time before we have a good grip on how to do such things with a computer.