Hello,

After applying "solve" to an equation system with lots of sin, cos etc., the result looked very unreadible for my non-math-eyes...basically, a lot of RootOf() and _Z4 expressions...The equation system has 6 variables rot_x1, rot_y1, rot_z1, rot_x2, rot_y2, rot_z2 and I have solved for rot_x1, rot_y1, rot_z1

...I then applied convert(answer, radical) and it looks like this, which is something I can understand  - a few fractions and root-signs etc...(see pic attached)

Question 1: Is it ok to do this conversion or do I lose some solutions without knowing it??

Question 2:

I then tried to eval the converted answer by assigning rot_x2, rot_y2 and rot_z2 with values....Actually, I expected that the result would be easy-to-read values for rot_x1, rot_y1 and rot_z1, but instead I get  something with roots and "signum" which I dont really understand (esp. the signum)....Therefore, I applied convert(piecewise) to it....Does that make sense what I just did???....Can solutions go lost or change when i apply the "conversion" function?????....

THANKS for any help....and sorry, I know I should better improve my Maths, but I guess there is no time for this atm...;)...

Hi,

I am an absolute beginner with Maple and am appreciating any help.

Basically, I want to use maple because it can deal with algebraic expressions. For example with Matrixmultiplication I don't just want to see the final result, but also I want to see the algebra behind each matrix element. 

So I have defined the following 2 matrices :

rot_x := matrix([[1,0,0], [0, cos(alpha), -sin(alpha)], [sin(alpha), cos(alpha), 0]]); 

rot_y := matrix([[cos(alpha), 0, sin(alpha)],[0,1,0],[-sin(alpha), 0, cos(alpha)]]);