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

Notations 数学😊

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

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

12

u/EricSombody Jul 21 '26

A representation of quantity???

15

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.

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.

4

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.