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Following what has been discussed here and here, which I found by doing some research prior to asking my question, it seems like the error function, defined as $$\text{erf}(x)=\frac{2}{\sqrt{\pi}}\int_0^xe^{-t^2}\text{d}t,$$ is some intricate object. No special values are known, besides $0$, $\pm\infty$ and $\pm i\infty$. However, what I was wondering is the following :

Is there a known result about rationality (or even algebraicity) of special values of the error function ?

That is, are there some known special values $\alpha>0$ such that $\text{erf}(\alpha)\in\mathbb{Q}$ ? This arose from when I wondered whether we could say something about $\alpha$ if it was such that $$\int_\alpha^{+\infty}e^{-t^2}\text{d}t=q\sqrt{\pi}$$

with $0<q<1$ some rational $-$ which indeed amounts to knowing when $\text{erf}(\alpha)$ is rational.

I known this doesn't seem like a much simpler question to ask than knowing specifically which value it takes at some points, but I perhaps hope that someone knows a bit of an answer to this fact. I am also interested in knowing whether some special values are known to be algebraic rather than rational too !


As a side note, perhaps results like the following may be used in some way ?

Theorem : (Lindemann-Weierstraß) If $a_1,...,a_n$ are algebraic numbers linearly independant over $\mathbb{Q}$, then $e^{a_1},...,e^{a_n}$ are algebraically independant over $\mathbb{Q}$.

Anthony
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1 Answers1

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According to K. Oldham, J. Myland, & J. Spanier, An Atlas of Functions, Springer, 2009 (Chapter 40 covers the error function), there are no special cases of the error funciton. I would say that the closest thing to what you are looking for is

$$\text{erf}(x)\approx\frac{2x}{\sqrt{\pi}}, \quad |x|\ \text{small}$$

Cye Waldman
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