Status: New
Owner: ----
Labels: Type-Defect Priority-Medium

New issue 1234 by fredrik.johansson: solve(4**x-x**4, x) (and similar)  
should give all solutions
http://code.google.com/p/sympy/issues/detail?id=1234

The problem of solving 4^x = x^4 was just posed on the Wikipedia reference
desk. I posted there some code for finding all the solutions with mpmath.

With SymPy, one can find one solution like this:

>>> solve(4**x-x**4, x)
[-4*LambertW(-1/4*log(4))/log(4)]

Four more solutions are:

>>> p = -log(4)/4
>>> (LambertW(p)/p).evalf()
2.00000000000000
>>> (LambertW(-p)/p).evalf()
-0.766664695962123
>>> (LambertW(I*p)/p).evalf()
-0.270279229207913 + 0.869544816180665*I
>>> (LambertW(-I*p)/p).evalf()
-0.270279229207913 - 0.869544816180665*I

Then, one obtains infinitely many solutions by replacing each LambertW(x)
above with LambertW(x,k) for k = ...-2,-1,0,1,2,... (SymPy needs to be
fixed to support the two-arg LambertW).

What solve needs to do is, to begin with, to include all four branches when
computing x^(1/4) in tsolve.

Secondly, it would be nice it could return a solution containing the free
parameter when one exists; something like Set(LambertW(-p,C1)/p,
is_integer(C1)).

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