ALEXANDRIA UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT OF ENGINEERING MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS
COMPUTER ALGEBRA AND ITS APPLICATIONS
A thesis submitted to the Department of Engineering Mathematics and Physics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering Mathematics
By Hazem Mohamed El-Alfy B.Sc., Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, 1997
Supervised by: Prof. Dr. Abdel-Karim Aboul-Hassan
Dr. Mohamed Sayed
August 2001 We certify that we have read this thesis and that, in our opinion, it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Master of Science.
Judgment Committee
Prof. Dr. Ahmed A. Belal Dept. of Computer Science and Automatic Control Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University.
Prof. Dr. Ahmed M. A. ElSayed Dept. of Mathematics Faculty of Science, Alexandria University.
Prof. Dr. Abdel-Karim Aboul-Hassan Dept. of Engineering Mathematics and Physics Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University.
For the Faculty Council
Prof. Dr. Hassan A. Farag Vice Dean for Graduate Studies and Research Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University.
Supervisors:
Prof. Dr. Abdel-Karim Aboul-Hassan
Department of Engineering Mathematics and Physics, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University.
Dr. Mohamed Sayed
Department of Engineering Mathematics and Physics, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
It is a pleasure for me to acknowledge the many people who have contributed to this work. Listing all of them would require dozens of pages, and may always miss some others. First and before all, glory be to Allah, the first teacher to mankind. I would wish to thank my supervisors, Prof. Dr. Abdel-Karim Aboul-Hassan and Dr. Mohamed Sayed for their considerable help in my research; something I can’t deny. I would like to extend a special note of thanks to Prof. Franz Winkler at the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation at Linz University, Austria. He was very helpful in providing me with several references. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the support, encouragement and patience of my parents.
Abstract
In the recent decades, it has been more and more realized that computers are of enormous importance for numerical computations. However, these powerful general-purpose machines can also be used for transforming, combining and computing symbolic algebraic expressions. In other words, computers can not only deal with numbers, but also with abstract symbols representing mathematical formulas. This fact has been realized much later and is only now gaining acceptance among mathematicians and engineers. [Franz Winkler, 1996]. Computer Algebra is that field of computer science and mathematics, where computation is performed on symbols representing mathematical objects rather than their numeric values.
This thesis attempts to present a definition of computer algebra by means of a survey of its main topics, together with its major application areas. The survey includes necessary algebraic basics and fundamental algorithms, essential in most computer algebra problems, together with some problems that rely heavily on these algorithms. The set of applications, presented from a range of fields of engineering and science, although very short, indicates the applied nature of computer algebra systems. A recent research area, central in most computer algebra software packages and in geometric modeling, is the implicitization problem. Curves and surfaces are naturally reperesented either parametrically or implicitly. Both forms are important and have their uses, but many design systems start from parametric representations. Implicitization is the process of converting curevs and surfaces from parametric form into implicit form. We have surveyed the problem of implicitization and investigated its currently available methods. Algorithms for such methods have been devised, implemented and tested for practical examples. In addition, a new method has been devised for curves for which a direct method is not available. The new method has been called near implicitization since it relies on an approximation of the input problem. Several variants of the method try to compromise between accuracy and complexity of the designed algorithms. The problem of implicitization is an active topic where research is still taking place. Examples of further research points are included in the conclusion.