TIL what imaginary numbers are
or aren't
yes
Discussion
Keep reading, complex numbers and their real-world usefulness in physics are very cool :)
could you tell me about some of the use cases for imaginary numbers? 🤔
Anywhere in physics where waves appear you'll find complex numbers. I'm studying quantum mechanics right now and wave functions that describe particles are necessarily complex-valued, so they have a real part and an imaginary part - imagine a 2-dimensional number that's a point on a 2D graph instead of a point on a 1D line like real numbers.
Beyond QM there's optics, signal processing, fluids, electrical engineering... all heavily use complex numbers
most of this went over my head, but the idea of imagining numbers as 2-dimensional seems crazy to me 🤔 never thought of them like that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f079K1f2WQk Just 7 minutes :)