[ExI] Not very bright

Gregory Jones spike66 at att.net
Fri Jul 16 05:49:16 UTC 2010



--- On Thu, 7/15/10, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
 
> Square root of minus 2?? what the hell does that even mean? I have NO idea, and can't see how anyone does.

It's a calculational device, comrade. Like minus 6 pastries. 1.41421356 i.

And you can draw the damned thing easily on a Cartesian graph or plane, where one axis is the real numbers and the other is the imaginary numbers. Easy as psi. I mean pi.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_plane>

Damien Broderick


Ja!  Imaginary numbers are unfortunately named.  If you work with them enough, they become real to you.  Controls engineers work in the complex plane all the time when doing root locus plots.  You don't want any poles on the right half of that plane, otherwise things go badly quickly.
 
Complex numbers soooo cool, and powerful beasts they are!  So much understanding is available to the prole who masters them.
 
spike
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100715/badcfddd/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list