Cohl Furey sounds like a goddamn new Marvel character, but actually she's a mathematical physicist. Can that really be her name? As a novelist, I feel reality is cheating by being so fucking dramatic:https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/ …
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Ha, OK.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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It turns out that if you do this, and just throw it in the bag with your regular ordinary (real) numbers, two things happen. First, the new system of ("complex") numbers is pretty easy to work with. Every complex number just looks something like 2 + 3i or 22/7 - i.
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...ie, every complex number can be written as a + bi, where a and b are real numbers. Once you do this, something happens that mathematicians get really excited about: _every polynomial equation now has a solution_. This is a *big deal*.
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Remember that we only tried to invent a solution for one particular equation, x^2 + 1 = 0. By doing that, we somehow get solutions for _all_ of them. We made things more complicated, but we can suddenly do a lot more. And that's why complex numbers are important.
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This is so important that it's actually called the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra!
End of conversation
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. Banned in Sweden. SubGenius, Zhuangist, white-hat troll. Defrocked mathematician. Brain problems.