What do thease #'s mean in W/A?

[alan2here]

In this link. What do the #'s in the solution mean? Also there could be 0 to 4 solutions for given values of x, q, w, r, t and u. How do the equations provided return those up to 4 values?

[Shadow]

W/A is built upon the Mathematica language, in which # denotes the slot symbol (a placeholder if you will). From the way I interpret the syntax (which is almost certainly going to be incorrect), the # should be replaced by a one (because of the &, 1 at the end). However, that would make no sense at all, so your guess is as good as mine. I do remember having similar output from the root function in Maple, and somehow managing to expand it into something meaningful, but I still have no clue as to what it actually means.

 

Another page you might find useful is the documentation for Root.

[Bignose]

They look like placeholders to denote floating precision numbers, to me. That is 1# denotes 1 stored as a float, not as an integer.

 

Though, this is just my guess.

[alan2here]

I thought everything was like a float not an integer by default as it is algebra.