Skolem (1956) studied the germs at infinity of the smallest class of real valued functions on the positive real line containing the constant 1, the identity function x, and such that whenever f and g are in the set, f+g, fg and f^g are also in the set. This set of germs is well ordered and Skolem conjectured that its order type is epsilon-zero. Van den Dries and Levitz (1984) computed the order type of the fragment below 2^(2^x). They did so by studying the possible limits at infinity of the quotient f(x)/g(x) of two functions in the fragment: if g is kept fixed and f varies, the possible limits form a discrete set of real numbers of order type omega.
Using the surreal numbers, we extend the latter result to the whole class of Skolem functions and we discuss some additional progress towards the conjecture of Skolem. This is joint work with Marcello Mamino (http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.07576, to appear in the JSL).
- Séminaire Géométrie et théorie des modèles