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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...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!
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. Banned in Sweden. SubGenius, Zhuangist, white-hat troll. Defrocked mathematician. Brain problems.