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UwU brat mathematician behavior (lemmynsfw.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [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