I was intending to make the same suggestion myself (concerning Allan Steele's method). When I read Allan's paper on this several years ago I made a few suggestions to him on what I thought at the time might be improvements -- which I will try to recover if this suggestion is followed up.
Robert's suggestion that there is an obvious choice of root is all very well for sqrt(2) but will not extend to more complicated expressions, I fear. John On 9/18/07, John Voight <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > For inspiration, it might be worth comparing to Allan Steel's > algebraically closed field construction: > http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/magma/htmlhelp/text702.htm > At no point is the field actually algebraically closed--it is just the > affine algebra on the elements that you've already adjoined--but when > you adjoin a new element it compares it to the existing one and > inductively builds from there... > > John Voight > Assistant Professor of Mathematics > University of Vermont > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.cems.uvm.edu/~voight/ > > > > > -- John Cremona --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
