REDUCE


Tutorials

The REDUCE interactive lessons

To run the lessons, you first need to download them, which you can do in any of the following ways:

  • Select a directory on your computer to contain the lessons directory then download lessons.zip to this directory and unzip it.
  • If you have the subversion program installed then select a directory on your computer to contain the lessons directory, open a command prompt window in that directory (if necessary) and execute the shell command 
    svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/reduce-algebra/code/trunk/packages/lessons
    You can also download individual lesson files this way.
  • To download or read just one of the lessons, go to the lessons directory in the SourceForge code repository and click on the lesson file (e.g. less1.red). To download it, click on the link labelled "Download this file" that appears above the file listing, download the file to your computer, optionally create a directory on your computer called lessons (although you can call it whatever you want) and save the file there.

The lesson files are intended to be perused in REDUCE (although they are plain text files). They consist of long comments interspersed with REDUCE input that is intended to be executed, and they automatically pause every so often so that you can read the next section. But you may need to scroll back to the beginning of the file or to the last pause to see the beginning of the current section. If you want to read a lesson outside of REDUCE then it is easy to do so in your web browser, as described in the last bullet point above.

  • One way to run the lessons in CSL REDUCE is to start it normally, click on the File / Read... menu item, find your lessons directory in the file selector and then select a lesson file, such as less1.red.
  • One way to run the lessons in PSL REDUCE is to start it normally and then execute a command of the following form (customized as appropriate for your computer): 
    in "path/to/lessons/less1.red";

It is advisable to run each lesson in a new REDUCE session, otherwise the lessons may interfere with each other.

Elementary mathematics tutorials

The following tutorials cover the application of REDUCE to a range of elementary mathematics problems at pre-university and first/second-year undergraduate level. If you spot any errors or have better solutions then please let us know. Other tutorials may follow as they are developed.

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the mathematics, which is not explained here. Please refer to the REDUCE User's Manual [ HTML | PDF ] for details of the REDUCE facilities used, which are also not explained here. You should be able to copy and paste the REDUCE solutions into REDUCE, but you are recommended to try your own solutions first.

Pre-university algebra tutorial

Undergraduate mathematics tutorials on …

Example scripts by Dieter (Olli) Egger

Dieter Egger is the author of Symbolic, a REDUCE app for Android available from Google Play, and some of the scripts available here are those used as demonstrations for Symbolic as shown in the screenshots on Google Play. Other scripts relate to Dieter's research in curved space-time. A brief description of all his scripts, with links to them, is available in either German (his original version) or English, although the scripts themselves are all in English. The whole collection of scripts is also available as a zip archive.

The following papers describe the scientific background to some of the scripts: