MATLAB: Simplifying symbolic matrix multiplication with e.g. transpose

Question

Hello

Im strugling with a thing in MATLAB and havent figured out how it can be solved.

How do you tryout math rules like:

(W W^T X)^T * (W W^T X) = X^T W W^T W W^T X

Its not possible to do the following:

syms X W
(W*W'*X)'*(W*W'*X)
transpose((W*transpose(W)*X))*(W*transpose(W)*X)

Which gives: W^4*X^2

or like: (X+W)' = X'+W'.

So to sum up my question: How do you do symbolic math calculations in MATLAB?

Answer 1

To denote transpose with an apostrophe, you need to type it as

syms X W
(W*W.'*X).'*(W*W.'*X)

which will result in

W^4*X^2