Fake and gay.
No way the engineer corrects the mathematician for using j instead of i.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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As an engineer I fully agree. Engineers¹ aren't even able to do basic arithmetics. I even cannot count to 10.
¹ Except maybe Electrical engineers. They seem to be quite smart.
Electrical engineers are the ones that use j though (because i is used for current)
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10? That’s the name some put to 1e1, right?
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How do we know it's gay though? OP could be a girl (male)
Because it's 4chan. And there are no women on the Internet on 4chan
Sure OP is a girl. Guy In Real Life
Newfag.
(sorry! seemed like the appropriate 4chan reply)
The mathematician also used "operative" instead of, uh, something else, and "associative" instead of "commutative"
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Right? They got that shit backwards. Op is a fraud. i is used in pure math, j is used in engineering.
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My thoughts exactly lol
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.
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.
Pikachu engineer
That's a fucking favorite now. Keeping that in my back pocket.
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The fun starts when you study quaternions
i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = −1
This can't be real
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!)
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I agree. Clearly i is current. What is this i=√-1 nonsense.
[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.
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Is anyone doing anything tonight?
no, d..do you have a plan?
Something something distance calls for norm, not just squares.
||i||² + ||1||² = 2
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NGL, this is hot.
I’m a mechanical engineering student with a math minor and I’m a switch so yeah, I’d take either side of this
operative?
Also mathematicians use i for imaginary, engineers use j. The story does not add up. I have never seen a single mathematician use j for imaginary.
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Me, a language/arts person: "Huh?"
This is the kind of brat I can get behind. 😏
😏
I have no idea what they're talking about, but I do love a happy ending.
As a physicist I can't understand why would anyone complain about a +jb or $\int dx f(x)$. Probably because we don't fuck
As a software dude I can see you wrote a regex, I just can't find out what you're trying to match.
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Why would a mathematician use j for imaginary numbers and why would engineer be mad at them?
The only thing I can think of is that the OP studied electrical engineering at some point. But it's a 4chan story so probably fake anyway.
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Relationship goals
They both bottoms.
I think rather d/dx is the operator. You apply it to an expression to bind free occurrences of x in that expression. For example, dx²/dx is best understood as d/dx (x²). The notation would be clear if you implement calculus in a program.
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I believe the correct terminology is denominator mathematician.
I love how that wannabe 4chan nerd just got outnerded in the comment section
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