Levi-Civita Field - Extensions and Applications

Extensions and Applications

The field can be algebraically closed by adjoining an imaginary unit (i), or by letting the coefficients be complex. It is rich enough to allow a significant amount of analysis to be done, but its elements can still be represented on a computer in the same sense that real numbers can be represented using floating point. It is the basis of automatic differentiation, a way to perform differentiation in cases that are intractable by symbolic differentiation or finite-difference methods.

Hahn series (with real coefficients and value group ) are a larger field which relaxes the condition on the support of being left finite to that of being well-ordered (i.e., admitting no infinite decreasing sequence): this gives a meaning to series such as which are not in the Levi-Civita field.

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