6.54.3 Reducing a quadratic form: gauss

The gauss command uses Gauss’s algorithm to write a quadratic form as a sum or difference of squares.

• gauss takes two arguments:
  • q, a symbolic expression representing a quadratic form.
  • vars, a vector of variable names.
• gauss(q,vars) returns q written as sum or difference of squares.

Example.
Input:

Output: