An application of symbolic computation to crystal physics

Abstract

This paper describes a practical application of symbolic computation to a problem in chemical physics. We compute a series approximation to a fairly complicated integral using straightforward techniques, allowing the computer to take over when the problem becomes too messy. Even though Altran [1] has no direct way to handle non-rational functions, introducing a few auxiliary variables renders the problem tractable. We certainly hope that more users will attempt to solve standard problems of this sort using symbolic manipulation programs.