Ricci and Mathematica Version 3
Version 3 of Mathematica,
as anyone who has used it knows, has extensive support for WSYWIG input
and output of mathematics. I hope at some time in the future to revise
Ricci's formatting capabilities to make use of these features for
displaying indexed tensor expressions, but so far I have not had time to
do so. The latest release of Ricci, Version 1.32, incorporates some
minor revisions to improve its operation under Mathematica Version
3. The most visible change is that Ricci's current formatting routines
will work correctly only in OutputForm, while Mathematica's default
output format for notebooks is StandardForm. Therefore, when you use
Ricci in a Mathematica 3.0 notebook, you should change the default
output format to OutputForm. When you start Ricci under Mathematica 3.x,
you'll get a message showing how to do this by choosing Default Output
Format Type from the Cell menu. Other than this introductory message,
the only things I've changed are:
-
Fixed a serious bug in the parenthesizing of output expressions involving
products of tensors and constants.
-
Slightly revised handling of functions and constants with options such
as Type->Positive or Type->NonNegative, to be more consistent
with the way Mathematica 3.0 tests signs. This should still work correctly
with Mathematica 2.0.
-
Corrected the handling of a few names that are now built-in functions under
Mathematica 3.0, but were not under version 2.0. This will eliminate some
annoying error messages.
-
Fixed a bug in the insertion of indices into expressions of the form Del[x,Connection->c].
If you run into any problems using Ricci 1.32 under Mathematica 3.0, please
let me know.
Jack Lee <lee@math.washington.edu>
Ricci
home page.