I'm a long time Mathcad user (back to the DOS version) and I think SMath is great, better than what Mathcad has become. So I'm surprised to be so stumped by something so simple. How do I get the magnitude of a vector? In Mathcad I'd use the "|" keyboard shortcut, but in SMath that's a Boolean OR. In the tool palettes I see two operators that look like what I want: absolute value (works only on scalars) and determinant (works only on square matrices). I know this probably seems like a dumb question but I can't find reference to it anywhere.

Just discovered the answer apparently is the "norme" function, kind of like in MATLAB. Mathcad has it too, but for square matrices only. I guess I was thinking more like an engineer than a mathematician. Would still be interested to know whether there's a way I'm missing that makes the vector magnitude look like |x| which is the usage I'm used to.

For only numerical procedures it seems that you can redefine abs(x) in this way:



Notice that this don't works for derivatives. It could be a good idea typesetting norme(x) as ||x|| (double bar).

Best regards.
Alvaro.

Wrote

How do I get the magnitude of a vector?

More generally, the length of a vector is its arc length.
Then from simple Wikipedia style or mathematically computable..
Always possible from discrete data + finite differences.

Wrote

makes the vector magnitude look like |x|

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