HP 50G help

[ttw]

One idea that sometimes helps in doing symbolic manipulations is to replace named constants like "a" in the OP with a big prime like 997. Then, even if the symbolic program doesn't work well with letters, the traces of 997 (or whatever) can be used to unravel the answer. One tends to get things like (a-1) or a**2 or the like.

Really big primes are needed so that simple operations like differentiation or integration will not create the numbers; clearly small numbers like 2,3,4,... can be generated algebraically. Numbers like 997 are rarer. If 997 seems to small, 1000033 may be used.