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Originally posted by beltorak:
I much prefer 'e'. It shows up everywhere too. Anytime the rate of change of an item depends on the quantity of that item, 'e' is thrown into the mix. Population, stored charge, the effects of friction on harmonic motion... you name it.
2.7818281828459045....
Yeah, said that.
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then again 'i' is great for giggles when it shows up in physics and people try to explain it in real terms -- "A particle with an imaginary mass -- yeah, of course! it would have negative energy, which is to say that it travels backwards in time, and it would take an infinate amount of energy to slow it down to the speed of light... in theory... we haven't actually caught one yet, but the math says that it exists!"
i is cool indeed.
But actually, since energy is .5mv^2 (or mc^2, with m = relative mass), you need a *negative*, not an imaginary, mass to obtain negative energy (an imaginary speed would work too). And math says it *could* exist, not that it does.
A particle with imaginary mass would have imaginary energy.
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For the concrete minds, '1' is a great number too... "The Unit"; upon which counting becomes relevent.
Nah, 1 is lame.
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'0' is an interesting number just because us poor backwards westerners had no idea it existed before we stole it from the arabs. Could you imagine what it would be like not to understand zero as a number? To the Greeks: "Q: If I had three apples, and I gave three apples away, how many do I have? A: What do you mean, how many? You don't have any! There's no such thing as less than one!" -- enter zeno.
Now, zero is indeed cool. It looks lame, but is very interesting indeed. Imagine, for example, x/0 (x!=0) and 0/0. These divisions are debatable (you can't, for example, say x/0 is infinity, because x can be 0, and 0 * (1 / 0) (which is the same as 0/0) must be 0, since 0 * anything is 0.
Also, any vector space needs to be either 1) empty, 2) {0} (only the zero element), or 3) an infinite amount of elements in every dimention said vector space has. So 0 is indeed special.
Note that while 0 has to be in such a collection, 1 needen't be. There is, of course, any first element after 0 in every sane vector space, but that is only a special one if you have a multipication of some kind.
Q: if you see 3 people entering a building, and 5 going out, how many are inside?
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But the numbers are not nearly as much fun as equations: e^({pi}i) + 1 = 0 is a fundamental truth....
e^({pi}i} = -1 sounds cooler
Quite nice, that all three of those numbers, which are odd and seem to be entirely unrelated whatsoever, combine so well in one formula.
