radical extension
A radical tower is a field extension which has a filtration
where for each , , there exists an element and a natural number such that and .
A radical extension is a field extension for which there exists a radical tower with . The notion of radical extension coincides with the informal concept of solving for the roots of a polynomial by radicals
, in the sense that a polynomial over is solvable by radicals if and only if its splitting field
is a radical extension of .