That's pretty cool. I've gotten part of the way, but I'm stuck on deriving 1. The only way I've found of deriving the constant 1 (given a value x that is known to not be zero) is to repeatedly iterate f(x)=(x+1/x)/2. This converges quadratically, but it's not a classical ruler-and-compass solution. Is "1" itself the biggest problem in "problem 1"? - Robert (If I can assume that 1 is given then RIES gives me the rest, I'll explain if anyone is interested.) On 7/20/12, Thane Plambeck <tplambeck@gmail.com> wrote:
This reminds me of Problem 1 in Donald J Newman's "Problem Seminar":
Derive the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division from subtraction and reciprocal.
-- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com