American Citizen on Mon, 21 Jul 2025 21:33:59 +0200


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question on correct mathematical construct to hold coordinates


Hello all:

My experiment with trying to use number fields failed to keep accurate accounting of rationality, upon rotations of coordinates has failed, most likely due to my lack of knowledge of what polynomials are legitimate or not for initializing the field. For example nfinit(x^2-1/2) didn't work too well for me.

I need the proper GP-Pari mathematical construct to hold point coordinate data, which starts at a rational vector, say [1/3, 2/3, 2/3] and gets rotated by some angle, or by a bivector. The cosine is rational, but the sine may or may not be rational, depending if the cosine is Pythagorean or not. (2mn/m^2-n^2)

Is there a way to avoid shoving all the point coordinate data after a rotation into the t_REAL field and to keep the 2nd or 4th degree polynomial, which the points coordinates will lie in? I could use algdep(pt[x,y],2) or algdep(pt[x,y],4) to recover the polynomial from t_REAL after the rotation, and then know the roots correctly instead of trying to make pull from t_REAL --> t_FRAC and not being able to distinguish if the t_REAL is irrational (2nd or 4th degree poly) or rational?

Has anyone worked with point coordinates this way? I would appreciate some tips.

Otherwise I will have to crank the precision up to 1000 digits or so, do the rotations, then use bestappr() or contfracpnqn(contfrac()) to recover the rationals, if they exist, or hope that algdep(pt,4) knows what to do also.

Randall