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S. Carnahan
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(I'll delete this if your student came up with the same answer.)

Choose a ring-theoretic automorphism of the complex numbers that doesn't fix the reals (I'm pretty sure any nontrivial automorphism other than complex conjugation will work), and consider the image of the reals in it. A similar trick should work for any real closed field with transcendence degree at least 1 over Q. I'm not sure what I was thinking with the last sentence, but it's clearly false.

However, a similar trick should work for any finite Galois extension of complete normed fields such that the overfield has a discontinuous automorphism. For example, if we hit $\mathbb{C}((t))$ with some discontinuous non-$\mathbb{C}$-linear automorphism, I think the subfield $\mathbb{C}((t^3))$ is sent to a dense subfield.

S. Carnahan
  • 45.7k
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