Finding Your Roots - Steven Strogatz
08/03/10 16:11 Filed in: Mathematics
This wonderful article from the New York Times online describes the fascinating advances in theoretical mathematics which I think, will one day merge with the mystical concept of reality.
For more than 2,500 years, mathematicians have been obsessed with solving for x. The story of their struggle to find the “roots” — the solutions — of increasingly complicated equations is one of the great epics in the history of human thought.
And yet, through it all, there’s been an irritant, a nagging little thing that won’t go away: the solutions often involve square roots of negative numbers. Such solutions were long derided as “sophistic” or “fictitious” because they seemed nonsensical on their face.
Until the 1700s or so, mathematicians believed that square roots of negative numbers simply couldn’t exist.
They couldn’t be positive numbers, after all, since a positive times a positive is always positive, and we’re looking for numbers whose square is negative. Nor could negative numbers work, since a negative times a negative is, again, positive. There seemed to be no hope of finding numbers which, when multiplied by themselves, would give negative answers.
But with enough imagination, our minds can make room for i as well. It lives off the number line, at right angles to it, on its own imaginary axis. And when you fuse that imaginary axis to the ordinary “real” number line, you create a 2-D space — a plane — where a new species of numbers lives.
This diagram and my concept of (conscious/physical), (sub-conscious/pre-physical) and (human/non-human) areas correlate.
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