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Comment by SabrinaJewson

Related is the paper [What is a closed-form number?], which explores the field E, defined as the smallest subfield of ℂ closed under exp and log. I believe the set of numbers that can be generated using exp-minus-log is a strict subset of this.

In a similar vein to this post, the paper points out that general polynomials do not have solutions in E, so of course exp-minus-log is similarly incomplete.

What is intriguing is that we don’t even know whether many simple equations like exp(-x) = x (i.e. the [omega constant]) have solutions in E. We of course suspect they don’t, but this conjecture is not proven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schanuel%27s_conjecture

What is a closed-form number?: http://timothychow.net/closedform.pdf omega constant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_constant

parent SabrinaJewson 6 months ago

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