It's sorta strange that complex numbers seem to be basically used as an ersatz coordinate system.
Comment on Imaginary friends.
joneskind@beehaw.org 11 months agoThe fact that you can’t solve any real life electro-magnetism problem without them kinda put an end to that complex shaming nonsense.
Yet there are still people to miss the absolute poetry of their story.
In 1545, an Italian genius called Gerolamo Cardano was pissed he couldn’t solve square root of negative number.
« Fine! I’ll make it myself » he said, before sending everyone to hell.
He then invented an imaginary number i whose square would be -1.
It wasn’t until centuries later that another famous genius named Leonhard Euler found a practical use of those numbers.
Without those numbers we would still be living like 1800´s peons.
sj_zero 11 months ago
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 11 months ago
Iirc, it was while trying to solve cubic polynomials, that he found out that accepting the existence of sqrt(-1) let him solve them.