this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
824 points (100.0% liked)

Science Memes

15807 readers
2143 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
824
UwU brat mathematician behavior (lemmynsfw.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
127 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 145 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Wait bottom mathematican is using j=√-1 instead of i and not the engineer? Because I'm EE gang, and all my homies use j.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That part also got me really confused. All the mathematicans I know use i while engineers use i or j depending on the kind of engineer. I've never seen a Pikachu engineer using anything other than j.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago

Pikachu engineer

That's a fucking favorite now. Keeping that in my back pocket.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

OPs boyfriend is obviously an i engineer and hates j engineers. No one can stay angry at mathematicians - engineers on the other hand...

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The fun starts when you study quaternions

i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = −1

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 days ago (3 children)

This can't be real

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They're actually very useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

(...I think you may have gotten whooshed...)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Hehe, maybe a little, but wanted to share just in case someone didn't know :3

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I clicked your link, I barely made it out of highschool so I have no idea what any of it means, but I like reading things I shouldn't understand anyway, sometines it's so interesting even without understanding.

So I thank you!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Quaternions are the closest we get to lovecraftian horror in real life.

Four dimensional and mostly imaginary, they were carved into a stone bridge by a crazy mathematician in a fit of madness, Lord Kelvin called them "unmixed evil", and the Mad Hatter from Alice may have been inspired by them.

Also they have been a curiosity at best for a long time, despite the efforts of a ~~secret~~ Quaternion Society, but they suddenly blew up in usefulness in modern times as they happen to be an easy and fast way for computers to describe rotations in 3D space, so they're everywhere.

Yeah, lovecraftian as shit.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It gets worse actually. You can define a number system using any power of 2 amount of i-like units in a similar relationship to quaternions using the Cayley-Dickson construction

Fascinatingly, you lose some property of the algebra at each step. Quaternions aren't commutative: ABC != CBA. Octonians aren't associative: (AB)C != A(BC). Once you get into 16 i's with subscripts, it really gets crazy.

(Also, I just got the joke. Damnit @[email protected] your serious answer threw me off!)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Hehe, yeah, the joke was too good :P

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Maybe a bit too complex for its own good.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

this isn't real

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago

I agree. Clearly i is current. What is this i=√-1 nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

[Lapsed] mechanical engineering gang checking in. I was also surprised. Though, tbh, I think it came down to personal preference of the professor more than field-wide consensus.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

a real mathematician would use (0, 1) instead of i