wu :: forums - Print Page


    
      
        wu :: forums
        (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi)
      

        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> Roots got Slashdotted
        
(Message started by: TenaliRaman on Sep 10^th, 2004, 11:33am)

Title: Roots got Slashdotted
Post by TenaliRaman on Sep 10^th, 2004, 11:33am

a slashdot topic threw this,
http://arxiv.org/ftp/math/papers/0408/0408264.pdf

ofcourse i haven't understood much of it.
Is that ur paper towr?? :)

Title: Re: Roots got Slashdotted
Post by towr on Sep 11^th, 2004, 12:08am

I've never published any papers, and it's highly doubtly I ever will (I detest writing)

Title: Re: Roots got Slashdotted
Post by Three Hands on Sep 11^th, 2004, 10:54am

This coming from someone who has made 2604 posts (at time of writing)...

Title: Re: Roots got Slashdotted
Post by towr on Sep 12^th, 2004, 7:26am

Those are hardly scientific papers, now are they :P
Besides which they're short, and more speech-like than writing-like.

Anyway.. I'm curious as to whether that method will actually work. But it's not clear to me what and how he's actually doing things..

Title: Re: Roots got Slashdotted
Post by THUDandBLUNDER on Sep 12^th, 2004, 9:56am

Quote:

But it's not clear to me what and how he's actually doing things..

I believe he is re-inventing the wheel by deriving a method of exactly representing the roots of any polynomial (using a power series). But this is different from representing the roots using a finite number of radicals (which Galois proved is impossible).

Title: Re: Roots got Slashdotted
Post by Icarus on Sep 17^th, 2004, 8:38pm

I heard of, but never investigated, two other methods of representing the roots of general polynomials. Whether this method is an improvement over those, I don't know.

Galois proved that you could not find a fomula for solving polynomials of degree 5 or above that involved only the 4 binary operations and radicals. But there are methods that use transendental functions (I think you can solve general 5th degree polynomials using only trigonometric functions). The author of this paper appears to have found a means of building series to solve the equations.