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Thanks, barretter, I see now. I would never have thought of looking amongst the across clues etc.

Thanks Barretter and Orson.

Well thanks to the lucky googling of a friend I've arrived at the answer. But I think the puzzle was grossly unfair in that the hints towards a solution were virtually invisible and the result needed specialist knowledge. Two further thoughts; a) If the last character of the identity is presented in lower case it would surely invalidate the whole identity. b) Can someone please enlighten me about the wordplay for 17 down? I can't make it work without the addition of an extra word.

17dn. O=over +CY(S)T (membrane) divides GONE (left).
S being the extra letter.
I'm afraid I don't understand what your a) is getting at. Which character do you mean? The second letter of 17dn? Or the antepenultimate letter of 3dn?

I agree that the way the hints were buried could have been pointed to (a lot) more strongly, But, I don't think "requiring specialist knowledge" is a fair critique. What seems arcane to some might be well-known to others (I particularly recall endgames that required googling the Edinburgh subway system and learning what the British Rail logo looks like). And as a non-Brit I have learned more about cricket over the years than I ever cared to.

I meant the second letter of 17 down. Thanks for the info re the wordplay and for all other hints received. I count this puzzle as one of my failures!

Very honest of you, Escuan, and you have a point about the instruction to use lower case letters. O, or o is not the same as 0, though setters liberally assume the identity. The whole thing is a corruption in a sense, because the indices iπ, although superscript, should occupy the same lateral space as normal characters. ie the + should be where the = is.

Kilgore - wasn't it the Glasgow subway ?

I thought Glasgow was just a Scots word meaning Edinburgh. No?

Escuan, in the context of the identity, the last character is not a letter, so presumably does not need to be in lower case. Only two letters do need to be in lower case.

I agree that the preamble was pretty opaque in several respects, and there was nothing in the hidden material to guide one to the identity, so some rather unfocused Googling was required, especially as the identity is presented in a very unconventional way, as Meursault points out. That is inevitable, given the constraints of a crossword grid, but it doesn't help the non-mathematical solver to know what exactly to enter in a Google sarch box.

Got everything done except I believe I have a wrong answer for 11ac. I have three alternate letters from one word followed by a greeting but the completed word is not in my Chambers. As a result of this I am unable to complete 8d and 12d.
Any help gratefully received