Overview

The Symbolic Math Toolbox is one of the many toolboxes that extend the functionality of MATLAB, and perhaps the one that does so in the most fundamental way. The toolbox is provided with the MATLAB Student Version, but must be purchased as an extra with other versions of MATLAB. You can tell if your MATLAB installation contains the toolbox by issuing the ver command and seeing if the toolbox is listed.

The toolbox is based upon the Maple kernel, which performs all the symbolic and variable precision computations. Maple is a symbolic manipulation package produced by Waterloo Maple, Inc.

To obtain an overview of the functions in the toolbox type help symbolic.

19.1 Equation Solving

The Symbolic Math Toolbox defines a new datatype: a symbolic object, denoted by sym. Symbolic objects can be created with the sym and syms commands. Suppose we wish to solve the quadratic equation ax ₂ + bx + c = 0. We define symbolic variables:

  <span class="unicode">?</span> syms a b c x  <span class="unicode">?</span> whos    Name    Size    Bytes   Class    a       1x1     126     sym object    b       1x1     126     sym object    c     ...