Analysis on Surreal Numbers
Abstract
The class of surreal numbers, which John Conway discovered while studying combinatorial games, possesses a rich numerical structure and shares many arithmetic and algebraic properties with the real numbers. Some work has also been done to develop analysis on . In this paper, we extend this work with a treatment of functions, limits, derivatives, power series, and integrals. We propose surreal definitions of the arctangent and logarithm functions using truncations of Maclaurin series. Using a new representation of surreals, we present a formula for the limit of a sequence, and we use this formula to provide a complete characterization of convergent sequences and to evaluate certain series and infinite Riemann sums via extrapolation. A similar formula allows us to evaluates limits (and hence derivatives) of functions. By defining a new topology on , we obtain the Intermediate Value Theorem even though is not Cauchy complete, and we prove that the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus would hold for surreals if a consistent definition of integration exists. Extending our study to defining other analytic functions, evaluating power series in generality, finding a consistent definition of integration, proving Stokes' Theorem to generalize surreal integration, and studying differential equations remains open.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1307.7392,
title = {Analysis on Surreal Numbers},
author = {Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo and Ashvin Swaminathan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.7392},
year = {2015}
}