A Strong and Easily Computable Separation Bound for Arithmetic Expressions Involving Radicals

Abstract.

We consider arithmetic expressions over operators + , - , * , / , and $\sqrt[k]$ , with integer operands. For an expression E having value ξ , a separation bound sep (E) is a positive real number with the property that ξ\neq 0 implies |ξ| \geq sep (E) . We propose a new separation bound that is easy to compute and stronger than previous bounds.