Then, when those numbers appear IRL, what do you do then huh??
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
769 points (97.2% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
41143 readers
4115 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
another tab of acid since the first obviously wasn't enough
Practically everything people say about imaginary numbers you could also say about negative numbers.
Also... wrong about what?
men will invent new fields of mathematics before going to therapy
Well, new fields of mathematics are useful.
You imply that therapy is not.
Yes.
This is a thing that mathematicians do. Rather than just assume you can't divide by zero they'll go ahead and try and see what happens.
I've always thought "imaginary" vs "real" was an unfortunate naming convention.
I don't know about other fields, but electrical engineering uses imaginary numbers with AC circuits and changing electrical fields. Since electricity moves as waves, imaginary numbers let you represent what's coming 90 degrees later in a compact way.
And in optics, the "real" portion of a material's refractive index represents scattered light and the "imaginary" part represents absorbed light.
Carl Friedrich Gauss would agree with you on the naming. He thought the confusion/mistery around imaginary numbers was due to naming. He said +1, -1, and root(-1) should have been called direct, inverse, and lateral units.
Lateral numbers is my preferred term
don't forgot signal processing. Complex number theory is used a lot when it comes down to Fourier transforms of discrete or continuous functions.
but yea the naming convention of "imaginary numbers" is pretty bad, we did the same thing for negative numbers (we called it imaginary) when people couldn't comprehend of a negative quantity.
negative numbers are defined from a conservative system, basically a gain/loss relationship: if I have 2 apples and I give away 1 to a friend, I have 1 apple left, that loss -- that apple I gave to a friend -- is the negative quantity. For imaginary numbers, we don't really have a way to comprehend an imaginary quantity; what does it mean that I have sqrt(-1) apples.
It means you have an orange.
Yeah, I think it causes unnecessary difficulties. I actually think they're introduced at a time when you could instead teach them as two-dimensional vectors with pointwise addition and a special multiplication and division rule, and prove that (0, 1)×(0, 1) = (-1, 0) using that rule, so that sqrt(-1, 0) = (0, 1).
Then you can establish a convention that you write (a, b) as a + bi (and i = (0, 1)).
This is too abstract for younger students, but nowadays I don't think they learn complex numbers anyway, and I think it would be less spooky for the older students.
Imaginary numbers are typically introduced in a high school “algebra 2” course in my neck of the woods, like junior year unless you are accelerated or held back. I feel like it’s really common for them to not be taught well - the naming is something that occasionally trips up the teachers.
The teaching of them is something that really interests me - they’re the kind of thing that triggers the “when am I ever going to use this?”/rants about not learning how to do taxes. You can talk about the relevance to electronics, but DC electronics is already hard enough for most to comprehend.
I like to connect it to rotation. Show them the pattern of powers of i with physical movement - quarter turns.
Yeah. I think the vectors-first approach allows you to get straight to rotations, too.
The big thing is that vectors seem to be the kind of “shoved into the end of the semester if there’s time after testing” from what I’ve seen. Most of the time, even when I work with calculus students they have no idea what a vector is.
A big thing to is getting them to understand what square roots even really mean. I’ve noticed a lot of students struggle with getting sqrt(x) * sqrt(x) = x, so even just the simple “hey, can you get a negative by taking a number and multiplying by itself?” is often a hurdle cognitively. (A lot of this I suspect has to do with not understanding what multiplication or division really “are” - I usually remediate with the area model)
Wow, (potentially) omitting vectors seems like a big gap. Obviously it has huge direct practical use, but it's probably also the first introduction to how you can take a structure and augment it with operations. In that way it's the first step on the road to abstract mathematics.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Right, it's just an orthogonal basis. You can extend this to many dimensions, fields and geometries.
Not just electricians.
3d graphics are all about about quaternions (4d version of imaginary numbers).
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
All numbers are imaginary
Just one more axiom bro and it will all make sense... just one more I swear it's consistent... BRO I just NEED one more conjecture and it will BE complete... tHe pRincIPles ARe sOLid BrO jUST TruST mE!
It's not like the regular numbers behave themselves. Have you ever heard a coherent, non-self referential definition of the number 3?
2+1?
the only numbers that actually exist are 0 and 1. everything else is a reference to those
load more comments
(2 replies)
It's 2 plus 1
Yes. In fact, just earlier today, my buddy Darryl was telling me about a coherent, non-self preferential definition of the number 3. It's not a big deal. People do that stuff all the time.
load more comments
(13 replies)
view more: next ›