Comment on Conversing with Mathematicians
Deebster@programming.dev 4 months ago
When all you have is an imaginary hammer, everything looks like a rotation around the imaginary unit circle.
x = -10, i = √-1 so i² = -1 and 10i²=-10
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.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Found the math but no explanation.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 months ago
The squareroot of 100 is ±10.
OozingPositron@feddit.cl 4 months ago
The square root is always positive, but you can plug it into the quadratic formula to get the two possible values.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 months ago
Okay, fine the square roots of 100 are ±10.
ShrimpCurler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
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.
mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Nope. To clarify, square roots are the opposite pf squaring.
Now ask yourself:
What is 10² ?
What is (-10)² ?
If you get the same answer, then they are both the roots of the answer. +10 and -10 then gets together called ±10