Saturday, 9 March 2013

Does this property hold true for natural number values of k?



While I was playing around with i, I discovered an interesting pattern where i2k=i10k where k∈ℕ.



Here were my steps:
\begin{align} i^{2^{-k}} & = i^{\frac{1}{2^{k}}} \\ & = i^{\frac{1}{2^{k}}\cdot\frac{5^{k}}{5^{k}}} \\ & = i^{\frac{5^{k}}{10^{k}}} \\ & = i^{10^{-k}} \\ \end{align}



The reasoning behind why I was able to ignore the 5^{k} in the numerator is because i^{5^{k}} where k∈ℕ will always be equal to i.



I was hoping if someone else could check if I am correct or incorrect for assuming this for all natural number values of k.
(I would also like to add I am currently a highschool student that is just curious about math and that curiousity has enabled to come up with different conjectures just for fun.)


Answer



Your conjecture is false:
i^{1/2}\ne i^{1/10}.



The reason for the failure is the fact that the relation (z^a)^b=z^{ab} does not hold for complex numbers.


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