this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
808 points (95.9% liked)

memes

10464 readers
3324 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Tenthrow
The_Picard_Maneuver
[email protected]
808
They keep digging that hole deeper (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by The_Picard_Maneuver to c/memes
88 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Imaginary numbers were originally no more than an ephemeral reasoning tool, and were only reluctantly accepted as entities in their own right because of how damn useful they were.

That, there, is the story of pretty much all maths. There were occasional mentions of zero and debates about whether it's a number or not in old Europe, it only became widely accepted once base 10 became popular. And people still can't agree whether the natural numbers contain it!

[–] linja 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Hah. Church tried to ban it because it was "associated with illegal money trading", I remember that. What is it about maths that makes non-mathematicians think themselves qualified to judge matters they don't understand?

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

They did five minutes of research on ~~the internet~~ a stone tablet so their opinion is just as valid.

[–] linja 1 points 5 months ago

I only read one book, and it's a Good Book, don't you know!