Reddit reviews Negative Math: How Mathematical Rules Can Be Positively Bent
We found 2 Reddit comments about Negative Math: How Mathematical Rules Can Be Positively Bent. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
There is a whole book about this sort of question: Negative Math, by Alberto Martínez.
Basically, it's possible to come up with alternative arithmetic systems in which "minus times minus equals minus", but they would not have the nice consistent properties that we want out of conventional arithmetic.
The same goes for defining the imaginary and complex numbers. There are different ways we could have defined them, but the way that we do define them makes them work out correctly for various purposes, both in pure math and in applied math and engineering.
>There's a problem with negative numbers
>Spicy Memes:
>We cant comprehend 5-8
>5-8=-3 is not intelligible nor possible and does it have meaning?
>Signs are ambiguous, deeply ambiguous
>1/-1 does not make sense
>You cannot solve square root of -1
>Why imaginary numbers are imaginary
>How geometry and rest of mathematics lost its basis and intelligiblity and also became arbitrary
>Timestamps:
>What does it all mean?
>Negative numbers as negative quantities
>Do they mean anything?
>Is math real?
>We cant comprehend 5-8
>5-8=-3 is not intelligible nor possible and does it have meaning?
>Original Reason for why negative numbers were valid mathematical entities was because of banking
>Signs are ambiguous, deeply ambiguous
>Unintelligible formula works, even though it doesn't make sense
>We redefine division and its not what we were told
>Negative numbers are greater in quantity than infinity because of mathematical formalisms
>1/-1 does not make sense
>Famous problem that resulted from negative numbers was imaginary numbers
>You cannot solve square root of -1
>Why imaginary numbers are imaginary
>Utterly unintelligible formalism of square root of -1, that is just useful with no meaning
>Pure Formalism
>Why negative and positive as directions don't make sense
>Ambiguity of signs, do they have inherent meaning
>Absolute value
>Negative numbers is issue but people just stopped caring
>How geometry and rest of mathematics lost its basis and intelligiblity and also became arbitrary
>Mathematics as purely formal games
>Mathematics and real world memes
>negative numbers were never understood btw
>How to correct mathematics
>
>tldr: This guy read this book by some historian and got convinced negative and imaginary numbers do not make sense. He claims there's also "ambiguity between signs" because, "its not clear if they mean operation or something else". He claims that we gave up on intelligibility for the sake of formalism and now we no longer have real basis for mathematics.
Oh boy. This is some spicy shit.