Marital tension derived from imaginary numbers

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I was looking through some material on Euler yesterday and I was struck at who cool it is that i^i ~0.20788
Full of the joy of this beautiful truth, I wanted to share with my wife who said, "I'm not in the mood to hear about math right now..." She doesn't remember what a logarithm is, or Euler's identity, so she might not have appreciated this, but...

Denied!

The frustration, the strain.

I swallowed my intense desire to monologue on this out of respect, but damn, that's hard.

What is your wife into?

Hopefully, she wasn't expecting, from you, a critique of what people wore during the Academy Awards!

I'd be interested to know what that number means.

This reminds of old "Far Side" episodes when guys would pick up girls in bars using calculus formulae as pick-up lines.

She likes action movies, sports, shoes, accessories and fashion, philosophy, and music. She likes my enthusiasm for science and indulges me in the occasional monologue on astronomy... but math not so much.

i is the square root of -1... the imaginary number.

i raised to the power of i is a real number... Here, Sal Khan can explain the background:


And that leads to...
http://proofsfromthebook.com/2013/09/14 ... al-number/

Euler was amazing, I am temporarily an Euler fanboi.

I can relate to your frustration.

My SO could not care less about Science, Phil., Maths, etc...
Talk about fvking shoes, handbags, red carpets and her eyes light up.

Priceless

I am not married (widowed) but I can relate. I am female and not interested in clothing, shopping, shoes, fashion, make-up or small talk. I do have some female characteristics...just not obvious or typical ones, I guess. This is an interaction issue. I have a couple of friends (go me ) but it is hard to relate. I am into lots of things: science, the cosmos, botany, history and art are my interests. This stuff is SO exciting...(yes, I will be looking up Euler)...how do other people miss it...and talk about television or Facebook?

So I watched the video and it didn't help. Is there any way the concept can be expressed in words? Is this a way to prove the imaginary is real?

Oooh .... shoes...

So the thing about Euler's identity is that it brings together the geometry of circles (PI) with the math developed to understand compound interest and logarithms and the world of complex numbers, which are not imaginary at all, but simply use a variable name "i" to stand in for a number which we can't get to from the real numbers --the square root of negative 1.

The problem is that a positive times a positive is a positive and a negative times a negative is a positive--so there is no conceivable number that multiplied by itself could equal negative 1... but a whole interesting branch of mathematics with many real world applications opens up if we just bypass this problem by declaring that there is such a number (i) and then work with it.

There is a longstanding, open question about math: is it something that people invented in order to explain the world, or something that they discovered that already existed in some way?

This topic is covered in an interesting and accessible way in a recent NOVA episode: "The Great Math Mystery"
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/gr ... stery.html

It seems to me that math is something people invented to allow them to work mentally with something that already existed. The universe is fundamentally mathematical in nature, from the quality and behavior of the smallest bundles of energy to the properties of the largest structures spanning space time.

Even the seemingly non-mathematical aspects of the universe like poetic sensibilities or the aesthetics of shoe design are created out of mathematically bound energy and appreciated in our neurological systems which are made out of mathematically bound energy.

It's fine that not everyone finds this resonating with their innermost being in the most intense way, and it's fine that it's even dull to people--but if you are one of those people for whom recognizing these patterns and structures is a kind of bliss, then it is really hard to fully appreciate that for some people, the thrill just isn't there.

It's like listening to some amazing music, and then realizing that many people just don't hear those frequencies. Or something.

Earlier today, my wife was watching "The Universe" on the history channel and enjoying a discussion of stellar evolution and the differences between stars of various masses and various positions on the HR diagram... So she certainly hears some of the music!

Edited to add: GeekChic You sound like an awesome person. At least you get to delight in the nature of things, and it's their tragic loss if they don't get it! Congrats on the friends! I find it is worth trying to find some aspect of sports of fashion or tv to be interested in just to build relationships with people. They like to share that stuff as much as we crave sharing the REALLY good stuff!

Math is our language to describe such concepts, I think. I never learned to speak it, but I have heard of the golden mien.. about how beauty can be described mathematically.

I wish there were more like you...more than you could ever know....sigh

BTW - thanks for posting that. I had the chance to watch it a couple nights ago and really enjoyed seeing people dive into the philosophy of it.


And that seems to be close in keeping with what the one gentleman said who they'd been following along with from the beginning of the show. I would guess however that it shouldn't surprise us too much, if the universe is fundamentally mathematical, that math doesn't well up from within us as well in the way of our discoveries and our subjective labeling of it. Subjective math meeting objective math from that standpoint makes a lot of sense.


As an avid drum and bass fan for half of my life I've frequently felt exactly that. Lol, most of what moves my heart from the bottom up would have most people either giving an uncomfortable silence for inflicting something on them or would outright tell me to turn it off. In some ways it makes music even a touchier subject than religion.