Dear Robert, Thank you very much; that worked perfectly! Warm Regards, Altrus

Dear Acer, Thanks for the comments; you brought up a very good point with respect to floating point effects in the numerical analysis. I tried your suggestion and changed the Digits parameter, but although that changed the result, it still didn't give me a correct answer (I tried to Digits := 100). Neither did changing the optimality tolerance to a tighter specification. I also tried evalf'ing everything to a specified precision, but that still didn't help me. That said, I think you're right; this probably has something to do with floating point precision of Maple, and how it optimizes problems. Altrus

Hi, To add some system information: Maple version: Maple 11.01, build 303882 Operating System: Linux 32-bit version, on Slackware 11. Chipset: Intel E7525 CPUs: dual 3.2 XEON processors RAM: 2GB Regards, Altrus