Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Richardson's theorem
Summary
In mathematics, Richardson's theorem establishes the undecidability of the equality of real numbers defined by expressions involving integers, pi, and exponential and sine functions. It was proved in 1968 by mathematician and computer scientist Daniel Richardson of the University of Bath.
Specifically, the class of expressions for which the theorem holds is that generated by rational numbers, the number π, the number ln 2, the variable x, the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, composition, and the sin, exp, and abs functions.
For some classes of expressions (generated by other primitives than in Richardson's theorem) there exist algorithms that can determine whether an expression is zero.
Richardson's theorem can be stated as follows:
Let E be a set of expressions that represent functions. Suppose that E includes these expressions:
x (representing the identity function)
ex (representing the exponential functions)
sin x (representing the sin function)
all rational numbers, ln 2, and π (representing constant functions that ignore their input and produce the given number as output)
Suppose E is also closed under a few standard operations. Specifically, suppose that if A and B are in E, then all of the following are also in E:
A + B (representing the pointwise addition of the functions that A and B represent)
A − B (representing pointwise subtraction)
AB (representing pointwise multiplication)
A∘B (representing the composition of the functions represented by A and B)
Then the following decision problems are unsolvable:
Deciding whether an expression A in E represents a function that is nonnegative everywhere
If E includes also the expression |x| (representing the absolute value function), deciding whether an expression A in E represents a function that is zero everywhere
If E includes an expression B representing a function whose antiderivative has no representative in E, deciding whether an expression A in E represents a function whose antiderivative can be represented in E.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.