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Conversing with Mathematicians
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
When all you have is an imaginary hammer, everything looks like a rotation around the imaginary unit circle.
Explanation of maths
x = -10, i = √-1 so i² = -1 and 10i²=-10Found the math but no explanation.
The squareroot of 100 is ±10.
The square root is always positive, but you can plug it into the quadratic formula to get the two possible values.
Okay, fine the square roots of 100 are ±10.
Seems very inaccurate the we can only determine the square root to +-10.
That's not how the square root is defined.
You're confusing "square root of 100" with "the answer to x^2 = 100". These are different things.
Which is why I differentiated between square roots and the principle square root by saying the square roots instead of the square root on the second comment.
so you came up with your own term to cover your mistake?
No, I was being pedantic to appease the pedantic assholes.
Nope, everything they said is well established and correct
Oops, my bad
There's no reason to bring the quadratic formula into this. Square roots can be negative, but when talking about the square root it's normally assumed to be the principal square root, which is the positive one.
IIRC, your spoilery “so” is the other way round. The right side is the definition, and the left-hand side a layman’s shorthand, as the root operator isn’t defined on negative numbers.
I might very well be wrong. My being a mathematician has been over for a while now, my being a pedantic PITA not though.
I don't know enough to know how correct your pedantry is (technically or not), but to explain the meme it made sense to go through the symbols in the order you see them. I never got any points from the proof questions in exams anyway.