Hi *, unfortunately I can confirm the findings of several posts. Also working in the deformation of algebras, many problems I have (had) are not solvable by brute force attacks in reasonable dimensions. We (that is Rafal Ablamowicz and myself) wrote even a solver proceedure to solve algebraic eauations in Clifford algebras (\supset Pauli matrices) and tensor algebras over Clifford algebras. See http://math.tntech.edu/rafal/ and look at the helppages for clisolve and tsolve[Bigebra]) My experience in infinite dimensional algebras (= not easily amenable to computer algebra systems) is that one needs _better algorithms_. E.g. if you try to do representation theory of the symmetric goup or general linear group, that is producing polynomial invariants, that gets _very quickly_ unsolvable for decent computers. However, abstracting the combinatorics to Young tableaux, one gets an exponential improvement in computing time, which makes rather interesting problems tracktable, on the cost of much mor complicated combinatorics and the fact that you cannot use standard matrix solver tools. Bechnmarking such solvers is, I think, impossible ciao BF.

Hi William I hope your statement is flexible enough to include 'those people who don't like the java interface' and run maple therefore in the classic interface (which is still much more reliable and stabe and faster for every days algebra work, [possibly excluding plots, which play a minor role for me]. For that reason I hope that future maples _will_ ship with the classic interface still! Ciao BF.

Hi, what kind of objects do you like to tensor? A rather general way to produce variouse tensor products (though only tested in a particular realm) come with the Clifford/Bigebra packages, see http://www.math.tntech.edu/rafal/ If you just need a tensor product for matrices, that ships with maple, see the linalg (or newer Matrix) packages. In principle maple should provide via the 'define' mechanism a way to produce a multilinear operator (aka tensor product) However, till now maples ability in this direction is very limited, since you canne e.g. specify over which domain (base field) your tensor product is linear. Using the define which ships with Clifford/Bigebra you can e.g. define a tenor product linear over polynomails in x with integer coefficients etc. If you are interested in characters of the general linear groups (Schur functions) I can mail you a package which does that (see the old version at http://clifford.physik.uni-konstanz.de/~fauser/) I hope to finish the new version (over 50 procedures) by end of teh jear and post it on the web page of Rafal Ablamowicz (see link above) ciao BF.