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Cake day: September 8th, 2023

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  • I recall hearing a quote from the guy that coined the term “imaginary number”, and how he regretted that term because it conveys a conceptualization of fiction. IIRC, he would rather that they would have been called “orthogonal numbers” (in a different plane) and said that they were far more real that people tend to hold in their mind. I think he said “they are as real as negative numbers” along the same lines of one not being able to hold a negative quantity of apples, for example.

    The stray shower thought (beyond simply juxtaposing the discordant terms of ‘imaginary’ and ‘real’) was that infinity by contrast is a much weaker and fantastic concept. It destroys meaningful operations it comes into contact with, and requires invisible and growing workarounds to maintain (e.g. “countably” infinite vs “uncountably” infinite) which smells of fantasy, philosophically speaking.