Thread: Ti-83 Calculator... Matrices with polynomial coefficients..?

Is there a program for the ti-83 that can solve systems of equations with polynomial coefficients? Or anyway to create and manipulate matrices that contain polynomial coefficients?

I am using Cramer's rule to solve systems of differential equations in Laplace space. So, almost all of the coefficients contain an unknown complex number 's'. With 3 or more equations, this becomes rather cumbersome to do by hand.

Yes, this can easily be done in Mathematica or Matlab, but I can only use a Ti-83.

To my knowledge the TI-83 isn't able to do anything like that, at least not with its standard features.

Whoa, sorry about that, my computer was acting weird.

ditto. Mods, delete these last two if you get a chance...

You can definitely do this, but it would involve some programming. Hopefully you can upload stuff to your calculator from your computer--the code itself shouldn't be too hard, but typing it on your calculator would be a real pain. You can represent matrices as strings of numbers. Addition is easy, multiplication only slightly harder. The hardest thing would be the division algorithm, i.e. something that does polynomial long division for you. You'd also likely need the Euclidean algorithm, but this is just a hop, skip and a jump away from the division algorithm. I bet you can find the relevant code somewhere on the net.

Yea I was thinking I could easily write a program to perform this.. but like you said, I will Not be typing into my Ti-83. I guess I'll just stick to doing them the fun way