A Typical Example

In the lecture of today we derived the equations for finding the longest ladder than can make the turn in two intersecting mine shafts. Below you can see the numerical solution for this problem with Maple:

If you wish to use MATLAB to solve a special instance of the problem, you can proceed as follows: 

> L = '9/sin(2147/1000 + x) + 7/sin(x)'

L =

9/sin(2147/1000 + x) + 7/sin(x)

>> fminbnd(L,.1,1)

ans =

    0.4676
This was done with the latest version of MATLAB, version 6.1. The code in the book seems to be obsolete...