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I wonder why mathematicians use this funny i-notation? You could write complex numbers as vectors, e.g. 2+3i <=> (2,3). Of course, it is more terse to write i i
by beza1e1 15y ago
I wonder why mathematicians use this funny i-notation? You could write complex numbers as vectors, e.g. 2+3i <=> (2,3). Of course, it is more terse to write i instead of (0,1) and this seems to matter a lot to mathematicians.
- onewland 15y agoi is commonly used as the unit vector in the x-dimension (a basically meaningless term without more context). 3-dimensional vectors are often written as: 5i + 2j + 3k. Since you can assume that 2 is getting multiplied by the unit real vector (equal to 1), you can think of 2+3i as 2r + 3i but why write the 'r' if we know 2*1 = 2?
- kalid 15y agoI think it'd be awesome to have some sort of "decimal" notation where 2 + 3i was encapsulated as a single entity, something like 2_3. We don't write 2 + .3 when we mean 2.3, and this distinction makes it seem like a complex number is "less put together" than a real one.
- zem 15y agoin a sense it is - it involves magnitudes along two orthogonal directions. there is no qualitative difference between 2 and 0.3 in this particular context.