Comment on It'll be ok. Nobody's going to judge you.
sangeteria@lemmy.ml 1 day agoAlso tbf, rational numbers are just the lattice modded out by the equivalence relations (a, b) ~ (c, d) iff ad = bc, and the equivalence classes just happen to form an ordered field. If you show an undergrad math/science student this esoteric definition of rationals, the motivation of “2D numbers” makes a lot more sense. Of course, please don’t show this to an elementary or middle schooler, a high schooler might be able to handle this if they’re passionate about math.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
Lol, I was thinking this as I was reading.
The neat thing about complex numbers defined this way is that you don’t need to understand quotient spaces because under addition ℂ is already isomorphic to ℝ²!