A major problem in transcendence theory is showing that a particular set of numbers is algebraically independent rather than just showing that individual elements are transcendental. So while we know that "e" and "π" are transcendental that doesn't imply that "e" + "π" is transcendental, nor other combinations of the two (except "e"π, Gelfond's constant, which is known to be transcendental). Another major problem is dealing with numbers that are not related to the exponential function. The main results in transcendence theory tend to revolve around "e" and the logarithm function, which means that wholly new methods tend to be required to deal with numbers that cannot be expressed in terms of these two objects in an elementary fashion.