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Hands down the best wikipedia article ever

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r/mathmemes - Hands down the best wikipedia article ever
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u/SharkApooye avatar

Thanks for the red circle, i couldnt see where the text started

Same people would miss the joke when its not there

No

I've seen it happen

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Show your proof

u/Winged_Spirit avatar

It's left as an exercise for the reader.

I would have to dig through several months of comments. You're welcome to do so but i aint doing that

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what do you mean a joke this is very real :(

u/KhepriAdministration avatar

Idk it's kinda complex?

u/interstellanauta avatar

It is real as my girlfriend

I am real, my gf is imaginary, our relationship is complex

u/Tiranus58 avatar

Dementia

u/Tiranus58 avatar

Dementia

u/Tiranus58 avatar

Dementia

Hello fellow Reddit user with a similar avatar

u/yukiarimo avatar

Dementia

u/yukiarimo avatar

Nice

Dementia

Dementia

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Badum tss

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i implies a 90 degree rotation.

rotate the imaginary side clockwise by 90 degrees

Holy shit

Holy shit

Holy shit

Holy shit

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u/Depnids avatar

New feces just dropped!

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u/Pro-1st-Amendment avatar

It suddenly works now!!!!!! Genius!!!!!!

u/MrJake2137 avatar

Why not counterclockwise

The i means that the 1 was rotated CCW. If you connect the starting endpoint with the final endpoint after the rotation, you get the line that's labeled as zero.

The above comment said to rotate CW because they're undoing the CCW rotation. At least that's how I interpreted it.

My exact reasoning.

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That would be -i

u/MrJake2137 avatar

You sure about that?

Take 1, we're on the real axis facing right, multiply by i, we're on the complex axis facing upward.

To me that's pretty counterclockwise

i2 and (-i)2 are the same value, but visually it would mean that the side labeled “i” would be going either up or down. Just a reflected triangle, practically equivalent to each other

👍🏾

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i is counterclockwise. -i is clockwise.

No it’s not. That’s an arbitrary convention.

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u/ExpectedBear avatar

Or, more properly, inward-wise, since it's not on the same plane 

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Happy π day

Holy shit bro's a genius

Can someone please explain i cant get this Is it trying to say that after rotation you basically get a conjoined line?

Yeah and the hypotenuse becomes 0 like it's supposed to be

Ohhh ok thanks

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u/bostonnickelminter avatar

Ppl taking this literally 😭

For those wondering, i implies a rotation through the complex plane, which has nothing to do with the coordinate plane (R²)!

u/GoldenMuscleGod avatar

I mean, if F is the faithful functor from the category of field extensions to the category of vector spaces that “forgets” how to multiply elements of the larger field, then FC = R2. So they don’t have “nothing” to do with each other, but the fact that multiplication by i can be interpreted as a rotation doesn’t mean you just start randomly rotating stuff in whatever way is convenient when you see it, so the joke definitely doesn’t work in any literal way.

The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone by pi/2 and try again.

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i implies an anticlockwise rotation though? No?

Mirror the graphic

Holy hell

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It doesn't work, it should return 1 or 2, not 0

Rotate it away from you

u/Leftunders avatar

It only works if you accept that BS about lines having no width. Like, duh. LOOK at them. If they had no width, you couldn't see them.

Everybody- schools, mathemeticians, those ancient dudes who came up with "theorems" and such- they've been lying to us for literally millennia. Lines obviously have width, or otherwise nobody would be able to draw them.

It just frosts my poptart when my kid comes home from third grade with these "points have no height width or length" or "lines extend to infinity" numbskull ideas. Points clearly DO have those things, or you would not see them on the page. And not a single line in a textbook goes whirlling off into space.

u/ChipChipington avatar

I just imagined you saying all this in the middle of a parent teacher conference and the teacher's eye is just twitching away

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That doesn't solve it, the result is the length (not width) of the hypotenuse.

Also, you clearly didn't get what math is about. If you want to study how to draw stuff you go to art, not math

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From chatgpt:

Actually, that configuration isn't technically correct in the context of a right-angle triangle with real side lengths and a hypotenuse. The reason is that the sides of a right-angle triangle in classical Euclidean geometry must be real numbers and the hypotenuse cannot be zero.

To understand why, let's break down the issue:

  1. Right-Angle Triangle Definition: In Euclidean geometry, a right-angle triangle consists of two legs and a hypotenuse, where the hypotenuse is the longest side opposite the right angle. The Pythagorean theorem states that for a right-angle triangle with legs of lengths ( a ) and ( b ) and hypotenuse ( c ), the relationship ( a2 + b2 = c2 ) must hold.

  2. Imaginary Side Lengths: In the context of traditional right-angle triangles, side lengths are positive real numbers. Introducing imaginary or complex numbers as side lengths doesn't fit within the classical framework.

  3. Hypotenuse of Zero: If the hypotenuse were zero, the equation ( a2 + b2 = 0 ) would imply that both ( a ) and ( b ) must be zero (since the sum of two squares is zero only when both squares are zero). This would mean the triangle degenerates into a single point, not forming a triangle at all.

  4. Interpreting ( i ) in Geometry: While multiplying by ( i ) represents a 90° rotation in the complex plane, it doesn't directly translate to the sides of a right-angle triangle. Instead, it’s better understood in the context of complex number operations and transformations.

To summarize, a right-angle triangle with sides ( i ), 1, and hypotenuse 0 doesn't align with the principles of Euclidean geometry. The concept of multiplying by ( i ) is specific to complex number operations and rotations in the complex plane, not to the side lengths of geometric triangles.

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It is the imaginary triangle

In the argand plane

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I like the "imaginary numbers" joke from Calvin and Hobbes where Hobbes gave examples like "eleventeen" and "thirty-twelve"

I use this joke all the time

Fun fact: If you double eleventeen, you get thirty-twelve!

but it's not Tuesday

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This makes me uncomfortable. Can someone explain why (i) isn't a valid scalar for a triangle?

Edited

Because when we talk about the length of the sides, we really mean their absolute value. In case of complex variables z = x + iy absolute value of z is sqrt(x2 + y2 )

i is orthogonal to 1, so you can look at it as a pair of 2 basis vectors: 1 and i. And every value of z is really just a pair of 2 real numbers

u/ExpectedBear avatar

More here: https://www.nagwa.com/en/explainers/313156902046/ 

You have to take the modulus of complex numbers before applying Pythagoras, which means you treat the side of length i as "1", yielding root 2 as the length of the hypotenuse.

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u/dirschau avatar

Because it's funnier that way

u/GoldenMuscleGod avatar
Edited

Usually when we’re talking about lengths of geometric objects we’re in some kind of metric space, in which all distances are non-negative real numbers. And the Pythagorean theorem is already not even valid in all metric spaces (to the extent it can be formulated in such generality), it’s a feature of Euclidean space.

You could come up with some kind of generalized idea of a “space”that has negative or imaginary distances (for example the Minkowski metric used in special relativity allows for negative “distances”) but it would behave differently from an ordinary metric space. In particular it could not be a Euclidean space.

In particular in the axioms for a metric space one of the most important requirements for a metric space is it obeys the triangle inequality, which says d(a,b)+d(b,c)>=d(a,c) for all points a, b and c, where d(x,y) is the distance between x and y. This means (substituting a for c) you must have d(a,b)+d(b,a)>=d(a,a). But also in a metric space we require that d(x,y)=d(y,x) and d(x,x)=0, so we get d(a,b)+d(a,b)>=0 or just d(a,b)>=0.

This shows we can’t allow negative distances while still have ing a metric space, and it’s not even clear how complex distances would be interpreted with respect to the triangle inequality, because the complex numbers are not an ordered field.

u/ExpectedBear avatar

Because complex numbers are positions, not lengths.

Length means the distance between points on a grid, or in the case of complex numbers, the line between them in 3D space. 

Lengths can only be real values.

u/timewarp avatar

because then you get shit like in the OP

u/Admiral_Donuts avatar

Depends on your working definition of "triangle"

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u/Open-Flounder-7194 avatar

i = √1 Q.E.D.

Wasn't there a geometric anticipation using trigonometry to determine what's now known as Euler's formula? Maybe I can find it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Cotes "invented the quadrature formulas known as Newton–Cotes formulas, and made a geometric argument that can be interpreted as a logarithmic version of Euler's formula" So if you take the joke literally, it still implies useful math.

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u/SamePut9922 avatar

Link?

u/SamePut9922 avatar

Oh my god they have a page for spherical cow

Look up Wikipedia Unusual Articles

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Oh, that one's fun.

Sadly it doesn't include my favourite group: Jokes based on "almost all" taken as "all except a finite amount" and then applied to a finite set. E.g.: "Almost all people in this room are dead."

u/nombit avatar

you can add it

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the mathmemes identity

u/Vivacious4D avatar

also, i^2 + (-1)^2 = 0^2

Ah yes

u/Eucladoceros avatar

Now this is a proper length!

Wouldnt "i" be the 3rd axis to a flat surface?

Then it wouldn't work. i is a counter-clockwise rotation. Then it works fine.

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Doesn’t this actually work with the Minkowski metric?

In what way?

The norm of a vector in Minkowski space time is |x|2 = -x_12 + x_22, so I guess you could interpret the Minkowski metric (in 1 time + 1 space dims) as the “typical” metric in R2 but with one of the coordinates multiplied by i (I believe this would be called a Wick rotation in some situations?)

Actually yes you’re correct. In fact, a diagonal line minkowski space does indeed have 0 length, so that checks out.

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