I have been asked to check some engineering calculations even though that is not my area of expertise. Given the complexity of the problem I would like to use a software package to do the verification.
What I have been asked to do is to verify that the two sides of the equation are equivalent. For example I have about a dozen like this (some are far more complex):
$$(RT/(v-Td-c)+(a/Tv^2)-(b/v^4))((v-Td-c)(Tv^2v^4))=((RT^2v^2v^4)+a(v-Td-c)v^4-b(v-td-c)Tv^2)$$
Rather tedious work that I have not done in many years and I am in NO manner a math wizard.
How do I ask a software package to verify whether two equations are equal and which open source software package should I use for problems of this type? Also I no longer remember the terminology. Is it factoring? Is it optimization? Is it simplification? Without knowing what this process is called I am handicapped.
Thanks for any help I can get.
Another way, if a symbolic math package can't do it, is to compute the two sides numerically for a large number of randomly chosen values of each parameter and see how close they are.
They should be within roundoff error.
This can't prove correctness, but it would probably show if the expressions are not equal.