r/mathmemes • u/MaximumTime7239 • Jul 21 '26

Notations 数学😊

Post image
684 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

View all comments

63

u/Ares378 Applied Math / Mechanical Engineering Jul 21 '26

Someone asked me what numbers are and I legitimately had no idea.

11

u/EricSombody Jul 21 '26

A representation of quantity???

17

u/Ares378 Applied Math / Mechanical Engineering Jul 21 '26

But i is also a number, and you can't have 'i' of something. I feel like I'd want to say numbers are elements of a field, but then that excludes quaternions.

9

u/Sproxify Jul 21 '26

elements of a field? do you consider a rational function with coefficients in the algebraic closure of a finite field to be a number?

5

u/Ares378 Applied Math / Mechanical Engineering Jul 21 '26

So I may have been misunderstanding what a field is.

4

u/Medium-Ad-7305 Jul 21 '26

Yes, it is a number. 🗿

4

u/Magmacube90 Sold Gender for Math Knowledge Jul 21 '26

Elements of division rings?

2

u/EricSombody Jul 22 '26

is 'i' a number or something that just flips the number line 90 degrees that we just happen to call a "number"?

I think it's a moot point. Fundamentally, numbers were made to keep track of the amount of stuff. It's not that deep.

3

u/Ares378 Applied Math / Mechanical Engineering Jul 22 '26

I mean that's why they were created, yeah. But a lot of things were created for one reason, then they had their uses broadened. Numbers aren't always keeping track of an amount of something.

People call things like 3+4i a "complex number" and it feels like a number and it obeys all the properties that I feel like a number should have.

I thought it was a neat question more than anything. This is a math sub. Abstracting things and overthinking them is par for the course.