From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sun Feb 17 07:50:57 2008 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sun, 17 Feb 2008 07:50:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.68) (envelope-from ) id 1JQln7-0006Eb-4q for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sun, 17 Feb 2008 07:50:57 -0800 Received: from phma.optus.nu ([166.82.175.165] helo=ixazon.dynip.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.68) (envelope-from ) id 1JQln2-0006E3-Uv for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sun, 17 Feb 2008 07:50:56 -0800 Received: from chausie (unknown [192.168.7.4]) by ixazon.dynip.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id A9387CE58C for ; Sun, 17 Feb 2008 10:50:32 -0500 (EST) From: Pierre Abbat To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: naming the phrase "root of unity" Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2008 10:50:28 -0500 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.5 References: <775491.62104.qm@web62507.mail.re1.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <775491.62104.qm@web62507.mail.re1.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-15" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200802171050.28797.phma@phma.optus.nu> X-Spam-Score: 0.1 X-Spam-Score-Int: 1 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 354 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: phma@phma.optus.nu Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Saturday 16 February 2008 18:46, Liam Dalton wrote: > In mathematical terminology, there is a phrase "root of unity." My ability > to explain it sucks, so I'm going to copy the definition from the > controversial Wikipedia, and hope not to be shot down: > > In mathematics, the nth roots of unity, or de Moivre numbers, are all the > complex numbers that yield 1 when raised to a given power n. They are > located on the unit circle of the complex plane, and in that plane they > form the vertices of an n-sided regular polygon with one vertex on 1. > > I would like to find a good lujvo that expresses this without being > malglico; clearly, merely tossing together the gismu for "unity-root" will > obtain humorous yet non-lojbanic results. That's pretty easy: {seltenfa be li pa bei li ny}, or making a lujvo for the term, {pavyseltenfa be li ny}. The term you seem to be thinking of, {pavgenja}, would be more appropriate for "taproot". More difficult are "algebraic" and "transcendental". I was reading about Liouville numbers last night; a theorem states that if a number is irrational but can be approximated more closely than 1/q^2 by rational numbers p/q, it is transcendental. {algebra} is a valid fu'ivla, but "algebra" has more than one meaning in mathematics, and they should have different words in Lojban. Pierre