I'm currently working on an undergraduate research project and am close to a paper/poster.
A portion of my work involves differentiating a large function, which I did in Mathematica. From there I used the function Simplify, FullSimplify, and FunctionExpand in order to reduce the derivative to a simpler form for analysis.
I was wondering if there is a question of legitimacy in the successive outputs of simplification. Could there be some algebraic error that ruins the equality of each expression. I'm quite confident that my initial function was input correctly.
So I guess my big question is that if I'm doing rigorous mathematical research, is using something like Mathematica valid?
I don't have my code included here just because it's really quite long, but if you'd like, I can include it later on.