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Overview

My name is Daniel Geisler, daniellgeisler@gmail.com, welcome to my web site dedicated to promoting research into the question of what lies beyond exponentiation. I support the tetration community as a librarian and a historian. The original website is at tetration.org/original.

Development

As a person who has networked with many others interested in tetration, I've seen a great number of people reinvent the same types of extension of tetration, thus the name of Knoebel's humorous article, Exponentials Reiterated.

I am frequently contacted by young mathematicians regarding their work on extending tetration. The topic of tetration runs profoundly deep. Even brilliant well educated mathematicians find it difficult to extend tetration. I most strongly encourage young mathematicians to obtain the best formal education they can get and work with a mentor who can help them advance their work. As an educator I have noticed stages of development in the quest to extend tetration. Each of the following foundations has a deep impact on the rate at which one can assimilate what is known about tetration. The important figures in the research of tetration are strong in multiple items. The foundations are not a destination but rather an endless path of developmental growth with specific phases.

  1. A background in complex dynamics.
  2. Knowing the history of the development of complex dynamics and tetration.
  3. Understanding the analytic geometry of tetration fractals and its development. Can you view the tetration Mandelbrot set and the associated Julia fractals and see the story they tell? Can you look at a point on the tetration Mandelbrot and get a sense of the associated Julia set looks like? Can you reconcile what you see visually with your mathematical understanding? See The Quests to Decode the Mandelbrot set ... where important mathematicians in current complex dynamics use formal mathematics in lockstep with the rigorous exploration of the fractal geometry of the Mandelbrot set.
  4. Mastery of computer algebra. Can you reconcile the computer algebra results with your mathematical understanding?

Foundational Works

The purpose of this website is to provide resources for studying tetration. See Paulsen's work below for what is widely considered to be the most important current work on extending tetration and his tetration calculator.

Idea

Tetration is defined as iterated exponentiation but while exponentiation is essential to a large body of mathematics, little is known about tetration due to its chaotic properties. The standard notation for tetration where is and so on. Although as a rule all domains will be specified as used, the foundation of this website is complex analysis as gives the universally accepted definition of . The proofs on this site are founded on complex analysis which are then used to develop complex dynamics.

Mathematicians have been researching tetration since at least the time of Euler but it is only at the end of the twentieth century that the combination of advances in a dynamical system and access to powerful computers is making real progress possible. A major math problem that many amateur mathematicians find their way to is the question of how to extend tetration from the whole numbers, to reals and complex values. In fact, the Tetration Forum is a website dedicated to the subject.

Expressions like and are easy to compute in complex analysis, but expressions like and becomes very difficult, but not impossible. The expression is a good case in point. Doesn't it seem like it should be a real number? The simplest approach depends on the fixed point where , or , but using Lambert's W function we get which is complex. This results in solutions in terms of complex numbers. The expression is a simplification of the question asked by Kneser, what is the solution of for where as opposed to ?

Three Problems

A central theme of this article is that extending tetration and extending the Ackermann function can be achieved by extending iterated functions. So results will focus on extending complex dynamics, the iterated function from and to more general domains like . This immediately allows tetration and the Ackermann function to be extended to the complex numbers. This process of extending is referred to as fractional iteration.

A final requirement in this article is the insistence that extensions must be consistent with what they are extending. Thus when is constrained to , the resulting mathematics must be consistent with what is known about complex dynamics.

Extension Approaches

The following is a initial attempt to classify the approaches to extending tetration. While people are interested in an overview of the different extension methods for tetration, at present the best approach is to study the different mathematicians who work with tetration.

Formal definitions

Define with .

Given , when the function is holomorphic and also analytic or locally equal to its own Taylor series. If functions are holomorphic, the function is a meromorphic function.

The fixed point of where is commonly denoted as , so that .

and

so that .

When discrete iteration is extended from from to continuous iteration it is referred to as a flow.

An involution is defined as a function that is its own inverse, so and .

Arithmetic

Ackermann's original three-argument function , is defined recursively as follows:

Addition

Symmetry

Translational symmetry.

Flows

The archetype of all flows is the additive flows or additive family at given by ; the flow equation is just the associativity law .

Functional Equations

The Abel equation, is a type of functional equation of the form or . The forms are equivalent when is invertible.

The Abel equation provides a way to transform iterated functions into the additive family, which has a flow, and then transform back to the original iterated function now iterated by a flow.

Multiplication

Symmetry
  • Reflectional symmetry - the map or complex conjugation is an example of reflectional symmetry.
  • Rotational symmetry - the map is an example of four fold rotational symmetry.
  • Scaling symmetry - typically scaling symmetries are non-linear. The Sierpiński triangle is an example of scaling symmetry.

Hexagonal lattices display translational, reflectional and six fold rotational symmetry.

Logarithmic spirals display a combination of scaling and rotational symmetry.

Flows

The multiplicative flows are given by for some constant ,say for example. Multiplicative flows can generally be considered as of coequal importance with the additive flow; the two are generally related by an equation , at least where makes sense.

Functional Equations

The Schröder's equation is a functional equation of the form .

The Schröder's equation provides a way to transform iterated functions into the multiplicative family, which has a flow, and then transform back to the original iterated function now iterated by a flow.

Exponentiation

Logarithm

Tetration

Iterated exponential notation

For and with ,

with s.
,
Tetration of natural numbers

For , tetration is defined as or in iterated exponential notation.

Tetration with a complex base

Complex analysis extends the exponential function, allowing to be defined where giving . Let then the function, then

The iterative application of gives us power towers of to height , or as well as fractals like the tetration Mandelbrot in Figures 1 and 2 as well as the tetration Julia fractals in Figure 3. A famous problem is whether is an integer.

Figure 1: Tetration Mandelbrot escape fractal
Figure 2: Tetration Mandelbrot period fractal
Figure 3: Tetration Julia fractal at a = -1

The tetration Mandelbrot escape fractal in Figure 1 is the escape value of where . When is periodic it doesn't escape. This leads to a complementary fractal, the tetration Mandelbrot period fractal in Figure 2. This fractal displays the period of ; moving through the colors of the rainbow, red is period 1, yellow is period 2, green is period 3 and so on.

When the values of while the tetration Julia fractal displays the dynamics of the map .

The red area of Figure 2 displays the values for which is period 1, in other words convergent. This is called the Shell-Thron region.

Dynamical Systems

In the most general sense, a dynamical system is a tuple (T, X, Φ) where T is a monoid, written additively, X is a non-empty set and Φ is a function.

The function Φ(t,x) is called the evolution function of the dynamical system: it associates to every point x in the set X a unique image, depending on the variable t, called the evolution parameter. X is called phase space or state space, while the variable x represents an initial state of the system.

For any x in X and

We often write

if we take one of the variables as constant. The function

is called the flow through x and its graph is called the trajectory through x. The set

is called the orbit through x.

References

Curated reference lists

Ultra Fractal

Exploring tetration fractals is a valuable aid in understanding tetration. Originally the best fractal software was fractint which was developed on CompuServe in the late Eighties. Ultra Fractal is fractint's successor both in general and specifically for its support of fractint formulas. Its combination of a perturbation algorithm for quick computing of pans and zooms and its complete CPU utilization makes it hard to beat.

Zoom into Kneser's fixed point c of the exponential function

Tetration Mandelbrot fractal

Zoom into Tetration Mandelbrot fractal at z = -1.0