Fake and gay.
No way the engineer corrects the mathematician for using j instead of i.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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As an engineer I fully agree. Engineers¹ aren't even able to do basic arithmetics. I even cannot count to 10.
¹ Except maybe Electrical engineers. They seem to be quite smart.
Electrical engineers are the ones that use j though (because i is used for current)
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10? That’s the name some put to 1e1, right?
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How do we know it's gay though? OP could be a girl (male)
Because it's 4chan. And there are no women on the Internet on 4chan
Sure OP is a girl. Guy In Real Life
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Right? They got that shit backwards. Op is a fraud. i is used in pure math, j is used in engineering.
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The mathematician also used "operative" instead of, uh, something else, and "associative" instead of "commutative"
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Wait bottom mathematican is using j=√-1 instead of i and not the engineer? Because I'm EE gang, and all my homies use j.
That part also got me really confused. All the mathematicans I know use i while engineers use i or j depending on the kind of engineer. I've never seen a Pikachu engineer using anything other than j.
Pikachu engineer
That's a fucking favorite now. Keeping that in my back pocket.
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The fun starts when you study quaternions
i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = −1
This can't be real
It gets worse actually. You can define a number system using any power of 2 amount of i-like units in a similar relationship to quaternions using the Cayley-Dickson construction
Fascinatingly, you lose some property of the algebra at each step. Quaternions aren't commutative: ABC != CBA. Octonians aren't associative: (AB)C != A(BC). Once you get into 16 i's with subscripts, it really gets crazy.
(Also, I just got the joke. Damnit @HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone your serious answer threw me off!)
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operative?
Also mathematicians use i for imaginary, engineers use j. The story does not add up. I have never seen a single mathematician use j for imaginary.
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Is anyone doing anything tonight?
Something something distance calls for norm, not just squares.
||i||² + ||1||² = 2
no, d..do you have a plan?
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NGL, this is hot.
I’m a mechanical engineering student with a math minor and I’m a switch so yeah, I’d take either side of this
Why would a mathematician use j for imaginary numbers and why would engineer be mad at them?
The only thing I can think of is that the OP studied electrical engineering at some point. But it's a 4chan story so probably fake anyway.
fake and gay?
I think it might be the wrong way around: Engineers like to use j for imaginary numbers because i is needed for current.
Mathematicians are taught to be elastic with notation, because they tend to be taught many different interpretations of the same theory.
On the other hand engineers use more strict and consistent notation, their classes have a more practical approach.
Using the same notation makes it faster to read and apply math, a more agile approach helps with learning new theories and approaches and with being creative.
I have no idea what they're talking about, but I do love a happy ending.
Me, a language/arts person: "Huh?"
Medical here. "Huh?"
Moron here. "Huh?"
I love how that wannabe 4chan nerd just got outnerded in the comment section
As a physicist I can't understand why would anyone complain about a +jb or $\int dx f(x)$. Probably because we don't fuck
I think rather d/dx is the operator. You apply it to an expression to bind free occurrences of x in that expression. For example, dx²/dx is best understood as d/dx (x²). The notation would be clear if you implement calculus in a program.
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Relationship goals
I believe the correct terminology is denominator mathematician.
They both bottoms.
Can somebody ELI5 this for my troglodyte writer brain?
Integrals are an expression that basically has an opening symbol, and an operation that is written at the end of it that is used also as a closing symbol, looks kinda like:$ {some function of x} dx.
The person basically said "the dx part can be written at the start also, and that would make my so mad :3": $ dx {some function of x}.
This gets their so mad because understandably this makes the notation non-standard and harder to read, also you'd have to use parentheses if the expression doesn't just end at the function.
Note: dollar used instead of integral symbol
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