19 May
2020
19 May
'20
6:54 a.m.
On May 16, 2020, at 1:54 PM, Keith F. Lynch <kfl@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
The *second* thing everyone asks when they learn about i is which number is i and which is -i. Imagine the horror if they go through their whole mathematical career getting those two swapped.
I’m curious, what’s the *first* thing? It’s actually very cool that the Galois automorphism i <-> -i is co-opted by physics in the time-reversal transformation. The real numbers turned out to be incomplete in a very real sense! -Veit