# General advice on unsolvable equations

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• Nov 4th 2007, 09:09 AM
Optiminimal
General advice on unsolvable equations
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/9...mulaud2.th.jpg
t and horax are angles.
r, MC and VM are distances.

I'd like to solve for t, but math softwares tell me they find no solution.

While I'd very much appreciate a solution to the specific problem at hand, I am also very interested in how one should proceed on occasions like this. What I know to do is to make guesses and close in on a solution with the bisection method (or Newton Raphson if tehre is a derivative). But are there other approaches?

Could one use some statistics approach where one samples a lot of guesses on different parameter values and then fit new and simple functions t = f(horax,r,MC,VM) to that data?

I'd appreciate any advice!
• Nov 4th 2007, 06:58 PM
topsquark
Quote:

Originally Posted by Optiminimal
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/9...mulaud2.th.jpg
t and horax are angles.
r, MC and VM are distances.

I'd like to solve for t, but math softwares tell me they find no solution.

While I'd very much appreciate a solution to the specific problem at hand, I am also very interested in how one should proceed on occasions like this. What I know to do is to make guesses and close in on a solution with the bisection method (or Newton Raphson if tehre is a derivative). But are there other approaches?

Could one use some statistics approach where one samples a lot of guesses on different parameter values and then fit new and simple functions t = f(horax,r,MC,VM) to that data?

I'd appreciate any advice!

You could try some sort of numerical method, at least.

Is it possible that the software is being literal and telling you that there are no real solutions? (Such as in the case of $x^2 + 1 = 0$. This one "has no solution" as well.)

-Dan