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Note that 2575.97 also has the property that raised to the ith power gives i. There are infinitely many such numbers.


or 0.008983291.. Are there countably infinite solutions or otherwise? See infinity discussion few days ago at HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4526049

PS: Just curious, i am not a mathematician.


It is countably infinite. Let's try to find them all.

A relatively simple way to understand this is that i^i = e^(i * log(i)) for every possible log of i. So all we need to do is understand what values log(i) could have (there are actually many), and then we can work it out. But log(z) just undoes e^z, so we need to understand e^z.

Now let's work backwards. If z = x + y i with x and y real, then x tells us the absolute value of e^z and y tells us the angle. The absolute value of i is 1, so any possible solution to log(i) has real part 0. The angle that we want to wind up with is 90 degrees, or pi/2. Therefore y can be ..., -3.5 pi, -1.5 pi, .5 pi, 2.5 pi, 4.5 pi, ... .

Therefore log(i) has to be one of 1.5 pi i, -.5 pi i, -2.5 pi i, -4.5 pi i, ... .

Now i^i is e^(i log(i)) so it can be any of ..., e^(3.5 pi), e^(1.5 pi), e^(-.5 pi), e^(-2.5 pi), e^(-4.5 pi), ... .

Unless I've made a trivial calculation error, that is the whole list.





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