An elementary symbolics question: simplifying a nested/continued fraction?

General Usage
1

(Julia version 1.10.3, Symbolics version 5.33.0)

Here’s a simple example:

using Symbolics
@variables y
eq = 1/(7+1/(2+1/(4+y)))
simplify(eq)
simplify_fractions(eq)
expand(eq)

None of the last three work - the fraction remains in its fully nested form. What I want, of course, is the output

(2y+9)/(15y+67)

I would have thought this would be a very standard and straightforward process, so clearly I’m missing something, or doing something incorrectly - but I don’t know what! Do I need the SymbolicUtils.jl package? (I though that its functionality had been subsumed into Symbolics.jl, however.)

I’ve looked through the list of methods in the Symbolics package, and I can’t see anything else that looks as though it should work.

Anyway - how do I reduce a nested or finite continued fraction to a single fraction? Many thanks.

2

This likely needs more rules added to simplification.

1 Like
3

Many thanks - I was initially surprised that such an elementary (to me) functionality was not already available, but if it is a matter of adding some routines to the simplification code, I’ll leave that to the experts!

I discovered I could do the simplification using the AbstractAlgebra package, using a polynomial ring R over the rationals, and the total ring of fractions over R. This, however, may be too abstract for some people. Anyway, I think that being able to reduce a nested/continued fraction to a single fraction would be worth including in Symbolics, if it was not too much trouble to code.

Again, many thanks.

4

Yes, we’d be happy to have extensions which make use of AbstractAlgebra/OSCAR. I think most users would be scared off by their interfaces, but using them within Symbolics would be a way to make them accessible. We just haven’t done all of the integrations we’ve wanted to do.

1 Like
5

Another option is simply to import the SymPy package. Although this is not a “native Julia” package as such, it seems to work well enough:

import SymPy as sy
sy.@syms y
eq = 1/(7+1/(2+1/(4+y)))
sy.simplify(eq)

gives the result

(2y+9)/(15y+67)

At the present time, this seems to be the best way for me to do symbolic work in Julia. It helps that I have a fairly good knowledge of SymPy in Python. But I prefer using Julia simply because it’s faster and more efficient.

6

Yes, and there are conversion functions to make it so you can move between the two.