[lojban-beginners] Re: naming the phrase "root of unity"

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

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