and also ELI16 what a an imaginary number is and how it works in real life
In: Mathematics
So you’re running around a circular racetrack. If you looked at it from above, you could track your movement in terms of how far north/south you are from the center of the circle and how far east/west you are. This would end up with two numbers that are constantly changing as you run around the track.
You could describe the same movement by tracking how far from the center you are and how far around the track you are from the start/finish line. This way of doing things you have only one number changing (how far around the track you are) and the other stays the same (how far from the middle you are). If you go to a different track that is a larger or smaller circle, you just change the number that corresponds to distance from the center and continue tracking how far around the circle you are.
So you’re using two numbers to describe a thing in motion. A person running around a track in this case. It turns out there’s tons of things in the world that you can describe like a runner around a track. To do that you need two numbers to describe one thing. For historical reasons we say one of these numbers is real while the other is imaginary. In the end, they are both describing real things that happen to move or exist in cycles. Things that after a certain time get back to where they started.
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