This site is about tetration. Tetration is an obscure mathematical operation that currently falls under the category of Pure Mathematics, because it has few applications. Even so, many mathematicians have been interested in tetration, because of the historical significance of its relatives in the hyper-operator sequence, and because it is easy to make very large numbers with tetration.
There are many related functions that are not exactly tetration but are inter-connected in some way. When someone thinks about sine or cosine, they generally aren't the only things that come to mind. Usually other related functions such as tangent or the rest of the trigonometric functions also come to mind, or perhaps a vague memory that they have something to do with triangles.
One function that is intimately related to tetration, that
is much more well-known than tetration,
is the Lambert W-function. This function allows
many differential equations and equations involving
exponentials to be solved in closed-form rather than having
to resort to numerical analysis only.
The Lambert W-function
is so well known that both Maple (LambertW) and
Mathematica (LambertW)
provide it as a built-in function.
Tetration and its associated functions have been studied for hundreds of years, so it has quite a history behind it. Most of its history has been the investigation of the infinite tetrate. This function, along with the square super-root, are isomorphic to the Lambert W-function, so any equation that one can solve can be solved by any of them.
This website is an attempt to bring together those things that are related to tetration, or could possibly be of use in understanding more about tetration, namely various methods that have been used to generalize iteration to continuous iteration, fractional iteration, real-analytic iteration, or complex-analytic iteration (which could also be called holomorphic iteration).
Pages listed hierarchicaly by section:
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Copyright © 2010 Andrew Robbins ( |
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