Hi, we're developing a statistics quiz using STACK and would like students to be able to enter x-bar (symbol for the mean) into their answers. I have looked everywhere I can think of to find the syntax in maxima for this, without any luck.
Can anyone help please. Many thanks in advance
The first question to answer would be "what does x bar mean?". STACK tries to encourage meaning in mathematics.
If it has no meaning then you could just have students type in "bar(x)". Then define
texput(bar,lambda([ex],sconcat("\\bar{", tex1(first(ex)), "}")));
to display the "bar" function (which does nothing) with a bar over the argument.
Do you have "mean" in mind? Maxima has a "mean" function already. Is that what you want?
That's a little more complex, because Maxima's mean function expects a list. If you type mean(x) you will get an error. You could put the following in the question variable.
mean(ex):=texmean(ex);
texput(texmean,lambda([ex],sconcat("\\bar{", tex1(first(ex)), "}")));
but then you won't have the "mean" function available elsewhere in the question!
Chris
