Intersections of Real Closed Fields

Abstract

In this paper we wish to study fields which can be written as intersections of real closed fields. Several more restrictive classes of fields have received careful study (real closed fields by Artin and Schreier, hereditarily euclidean fields by Prestel and Ziegler [8], hereditarily Pythagorean fields by Becker [1]), with this more general class of fields sometimes mentioned in passing. We shall give several characterizations of this class in the next two sections. In § 2 we will be concerned with Gal , the Galois group of an algebraic closure F over F. We also relate the fields to the existence of multiplier sequences; these are infinite sequences of elements from the field which have nice properties with respect to certain sets of polynomials. For the real numbers, they are related to entire functions; generalizations can be found in [3].