- Compute the degree of this element the straightforward way
- according to the definition; by appending powers to a list
- and figuring out its dimension (that is, whether or not
- they're linearly dependent).
+ Return the degree of this element, which is defined to be
+ the degree of its minimal polynomial.
+
+ ALGORITHM:
+
+ For now, we skip the messy minimal polynomial computation
+ and instead return the dimension of the vector space spanned
+ by the powers of this element. The latter is a bit more
+ straightforward to compute.