MPSolve is a C package to solve polynomials and secular equations. It released under the terms of the GNU General public license as it specified in the COPYING file inside the source directory.

If you have downloaded an official MPSolve tarball you can install MPSolve simply by typing these commands in a shell:

./configure 
make 
[sudo] make install

whilst, if you have checked out the git repository directly you have to use the script autogen.sh first, and then the usual configure, make, make install sequence.

The last command is optional and install mpsolve system-wide. You can simply use the mpsolve executable built in its directory by launching ./src/mpsolve/mpsolve from the source directory.

Full install is needed to use MPSolve as a library in other C, FORTRAN, Matlab, ... software without further tweaking.

The examples/ folder contains a mix of example source files that use MPSolve and bindings for other programming languages such as Python, Octave, Matlab (TM), ...

The mpsolve binary is thought as a simple way to solve polynomials and/or secular equation using a text file as input. A generic input file for mpsolve is composed by a preamble and a body. The comments are identified by lines starting with '!'.

In the preamble will be specified all the options for solving and some general information about the polynomial. The body will contain the coefficients.

Every option in the preamble has to be specified as Key; or Key=value; This is an example of a valid input for mpsolve that specifies the polynomial x^5 - 1

! File: nroots5.pol 
Degree=5;
Monomial;
Real;
Integer;

-1
 0
 0
 0
 0
 1

! EOF

The same polynomial can be specified by using sparse notation:

! File nroots5sparse.pol
Degree=5;
Monomial;
Real;
Integer;
Sparse;

5  1  ! Highest degree coefficient
0  -1 ! Coefficient of degree 0

! EOF

If the Real option is not specified real and imaginary part of the coefficients will be needed as input. Rational input is also used in here:

! File: random-poly.pol
Degree=3;
Monomial;
Rational;

45/9 7/4
3/23 293/34234
234/2369234 2348234/324
324 234324/23