I'm still collecting information about open source systems (so I can give a
talk about them); and I've been looking at a few old test suites.  On
almost all of them Axiom does quite poorly, because it's a very different
type of system to most, concentrating more on mathematical correctness of
structures than on vast libraries of algorithms.

However, I was looking at denesting radicals.  Axiom seems to be a bit
hit-and-miss here; sometimes it can be made to produce a result:

(1) -> ex:AN = 6+2*sqrt(5)
(2) -> radicalSolve(x^2=ex,x)

(The command 'nthRoot(ex,2)' doesn't work here).  But for other radicals
nothing:

(3) -> ex:AN := 2*sqrt(21)+10
(4) -> radicalSolve(x^2=ex,x)

This doesn't produce sqrt(3)+sqrt(7).

Am I missing something here?  Is there some clever way of denesting
radicals?

In fact this is an area where almost all open-source systems do very
badly.  I've been experimenting also with Sage and with Maxima, and
although the later provides a "sqdnst" package which includes a
"sqrtdenest" function, it doesn't actually seem to work very well.

Second question: the hyper.h source file contains the font information for
Hyperdoc, but the fonts listed "Rom14", "Erg14" etc don't exist on a modern
Linux system.  I suspect these are font names from old unices from the
1970s and 1980s (Sun, SGI etc).  Now I can bodge up an .Xresources file
containing my own fonts, but I'm wondering if there's a nice list of
current Linux fonts that somebody else has put together for optimum viewing?

Many thanks,
Alasdair

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