Name: James Amundson Date: 12/09/04-05:29:47 AM Z


Dear Rolf,

I won’t respond to all your points right now, but there is one issue
that seems worth discussing first: the speed issue. You wrote

> The last time I checked the open-source Maxima for speed it was at least
> an order of magnitude
> slower for plain algebraic simplifications. Bearing in mind that even
> Mathematca can become way too
> slow for research projects (see the enourmous calculations of Jos
> Vermaseren and friends which they
> have done over the last decades, using a special purpose system: FORM),
> I really doubt that it will make
> much sense to reprogram much of FeynCalc into Maxima.

One reason a port of Feyncalc to Maxima interested me was the potential
for speed. I have never done anything like a careful benchmark
comparison between Maxima and Mathematica. However, in the cases I have
examined (which may not be typical) Maxima is *faster* than Mathematica.
In fact, Richard Fateman has a paper where he compares the speed of
various CA systems on some simple polynomial operations. Maxima not only
handily beat Mathematica, it also beat FORM. I don’t think Feyncalc in
Maxima should be dismissed on the basis of speed alone.

--Jim