'Underneath'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
i is not a number!
It is an imaginary one.
Noooooooo!!! Not any kind of number!
Leave the letters alooooooooone!!!!!!
(Okay, imaginary numbers are kind of cool, but in high school I was really dogmatic and knee-jerk in my dislike of them.)
(And I still don't understand how *imaginary* numbers work in *real* application.)
(And I still don't understand how *imaginary* numbers work in *real* application.)
It's the only way you can measure a unicorn's horn.
(And I still don't understand how *imaginary* numbers work in *real* application.)
They're very useful in electronics.
I'm with Steph WRT the practical applications-- if it is imaginary and not real, how does it help us make a curve in real life? Or what have you...
(And I still don't understand how *imaginary* numbers work in *real* application.)
Because i2 is a real number. Also this.
And I still don't understand how *imaginary* numbers work in *real* application.
I don't remember very well. I think you can use them to introduce a new dimension to a calculation. I believe one example is introducing phase into the math of AC electrical circuits.
Yep, that's the example Wikipedia gives.
Argh! Mathiness!
I'm with Steph. You math folks can have some punctuation, but please leave the letters alone.
if it is imaginary and not real
It's still a number, it's just not in the set of real numbers so it got tagged with a misleading name. Some people, I'm not saying who, are bigoted against numbers that aren't in the real set.
Look at it this way, negative numbers are, in real world terms, imaginary in that you can't, for example, have "negative three apples".
Some numbers are just more imaginary than others.