I'm very new to Maple and I'm just curious as to how Maple computes its summations with the MatrixPower command.

if A = a real square matrix

c = some real constant

x = c*A

then Why is it, that when I try to use...

sum(MatrixPower(x,k), k = 0..3);

I get a non-real / ridiculous result, but when I type it out...

MatrixPower(x,0) + MatrixPower(x,1) + MatrixPower(x,2) + MatrixPower(x,3);

x^0 + x^1 + x^2 + x^3;