[GiNaC-list] Simplifying indexed expressions not working onmulti-indices scalar_product

[Chris Dams]

Dear Alejandro,

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Alejandro Limache wrote:

> For example, in the area of continuum mechanics, its very common to see
> inner products defined for 2nd order tensors (2 indices). In particular
> the "stress power P" is the inner product of the stress tensor T with
> the rate of deformation tensor D: P = T*D=T.i.j * D.i.j and measures the
> power produced by the inner (stress) forces.

Yes, such a thing could be useful. However....
 
> 1) By definition an inner product must be a scalar so all tensor indices
> should get contracted.

Yes, obviously.

> 2) One must be careful with the order of the indices. The inner product of
> a non zero tensor with itself must be positive, from this condition it 
> follows
> that
> T.i.j * D.j.i               is NOT an inner product

Yes, the old implementation that I deleted would do this. Looking at the 
old code again, I guess it would even do T.i.j.k.k*D.i.j -> P if the user 
were to define that the scalar product between T and D is P. *shrug*

I can think of two problems with your solution

(1) What if the indices are of different dimension? Should it be possible
to specify a different dimension for every index postion? IMO, this would
get a bit overly complicated. Maybe user-defined inner products should 
only be used if all dimensions of indices involved are the same. This, at 
least, seems to cover your case.

(2) What if T happens to be symmetric and D is not? Then the product
T.i.j*D.i.j might automatically evaluate into T.j.i*D.i.j and the
contraction would no longer occur, depending on what the canonical
ordering of i and j happens to be. Not good. Maybe looping over all
posibilities for a symmetric tensor would need to be done.

I'm not sure whether I will have time to implement this, though.

> 3) Covariant indices should contract with contravariant indices
> so T~a.mu*T~a~mu is not correct a should throw an exception
> or not get simplified, but T.a.mu*T~a~mu should get simplified.

Oh yes, of course I should have written T.a.mu*T.a~mu, where a was not a
varidx but an ordinary idx. Never mind though, the problem was that if
these indices a and mu were of incomparable dimension (in the sense of the
function minimal_dim) an exception would be thrown.

Best wishes,
Chris