• PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1561 month ago

    Wait bottom mathematican is using j=√-1 instead of i and not the engineer? Because I’m EE gang, and all my homies use j.

    • GandalfTheDumb
      link
      fedilink
      English
      651 month ago

      That part also got me really confused. All the mathematicans I know use i while engineers use i or j depending on the kind of engineer. I’ve never seen a Pikachu engineer using anything other than j.

      • @ryedaft@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 month ago

        OPs boyfriend is obviously an i engineer and hates j engineers. No one can stay angry at mathematicians - engineers on the other hand…

              • @Jarix@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                51 month ago

                I clicked your link, I barely made it out of highschool so I have no idea what any of it means, but I like reading things I shouldn’t understand anyway, sometines it’s so interesting even without understanding.

                So I thank you!

                • @Klear@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  31 month ago

                  Quaternions are the closest we get to lovecraftian horror in real life.

                  Four dimensional and mostly imaginary, they were carved into a stone bridge by a crazy mathematician in a fit of madness, Lord Kelvin called them “unmixed evil”, and the Mad Hatter from Alice may have been inspired by them.

                  Also they have been a curiosity at best for a long time, despite the efforts of a secret Quaternion Society, but they suddenly blew up in usefulness in modern times as they happen to be an easy and fast way for computers to describe rotations in 3D space, so they’re everywhere.

                  Yeah, lovecraftian as shit.

        • CodexArcanum
          link
          fedilink
          English
          14
          edit-2
          1 month ago

          It gets worse actually. You can define a number system using any power of 2 amount of i-like units in a similar relationship to quaternions using the Cayley-Dickson construction

          Fascinatingly, you lose some property of the algebra at each step. Quaternions aren’t commutative: ABC != CBA. Octonians aren’t associative: (AB)C != A(BC). Once you get into 16 i’s with subscripts, it really gets crazy.

          (Also, I just got the joke. Damnit @HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone your serious answer threw me off!)

    • @grysbok@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      111 month ago

      [Lapsed] mechanical engineering gang checking in. I was also surprised. Though, tbh, I think it came down to personal preference of the professor more than field-wide consensus.