Zulip Chat Archive

Stream: combinatorial-games

Topic: Birthday of ω^x


Violeta Hernández (Jan 16 2026 at 00:39):

I've been thinking a lot about surreal birthdays lately. I have the vague hope that there could be some way to compute the birthday of a surreal from its Hahn series expansion. If there were, we could potentially find a proof (or disproof), even if a horrible one, of conjectures such as b(xy) ≤ b(x)b(y).

Obviously the first step of this would be to find a formula for b(ω^x). As far as I'm aware, the "state of the art" are the following theorems, from Field of Surreal numbers and Exponentiation by van den Dries and Ehrlich (2001):
imagen.png

Violeta Hernández (Jan 16 2026 at 01:03):

I believe I have a proof of b(ω^-α) = ωα for α an ordinal, so there's at least more to be said about this function than what's contained in these theorems.

Violeta Hernández (Jan 16 2026 at 01:03):

Seems like the proofs of all of these are just deferred to Gonshor, so I'll have to check that source.

Violeta Hernández (Jan 16 2026 at 03:35):

imagen.png
imagen.png
Oh wait so apparently this is all a known result apparently

Violeta Hernández (Jan 16 2026 at 03:35):

imagen.png
Proof by "Conway said he had it but he didn't"

Kevin Buzzard (Jan 16 2026 at 11:32):

I'm not sure there's a tactic for that :-/

Jelmer Firet (Jan 16 2026 at 15:18):

macro "by_conway" : tactic => `(tactic| sorry)

Scott Fenton (Jan 17 2026 at 01:49):

The multiplication inequality is actually proven here: https://www.impan.pl/pl/wydawnictwa/czasopisma-i-serie-wydawnicze/fundamenta-mathematicae/all/all/167/2/89226/fields-of-surreal-numbers-and-exponentiation

Violeta Hernández (Jan 17 2026 at 04:45):

I've read that paper, it only proves it for the specific case of surreals of the form rw^x.


Last updated: Feb 28 2026 at 14:05 UTC