Imaginary Numbers Quotes

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Did you know that in mathematics they determined what was real by what was not imaginary?" Finn's voice was just a soft rumble beneath my fingertips that had found his lips
"What?"
"When mathematicians came up with imaginary numbers, accepted them, defined them, they had to come up with a name for everything that wasn't imaginary. Everything that wasn't an imaginary number from that point on became a 'real' number."
What's an imaginary number?"
"The square root of negative one is an imaginary number."
"Is that all?"
"Any number that was once the square root of a negative number becomes an imaginary number. Square root of -4 becomes 2i, square root of -100 becomes 10i."
"Is infinity an imaginary number?"
"No."
"Is it a real number?"
"No. It isn't a number at all. It's a concept of endlessness, unreachableness.
"I knew it. See? You are just a figment of my imagination. ~ Amy Harmon

I find imaginary numbers useful when computing my tax deductions. ~ Ramamurti Shankar

Some people believe in imaginary friends. I believe in imaginary numbers. ~ R.M. ArceJaeger

But that there is a simple relation between literary and other fictions seems, if one attends to it, more obvious than has appeared. If we think first of modern fictions, it can hardly be an accident that ever since Nietzsche generalized and developed the Kantian insights, literature has increasingly asserted its right to an arbitrary and private choice of fictional norms, just as historiography has become a discipline more devious and dubious because of our recognition that its methods depend to an unsuspected degree on myths and fictions. After Nietzsche it was possible to say, as Stevens did, that 'the final belief must be in a fiction.' This poet, to whom the whole question was of perpetual interest, saw that to think in this way was to postpone the End--when the fiction might be said to coincide with reality--for ever; to make of it a fiction, an imaginary moment when 'at last' the world of fact and the mundo of fiction shall be one. Such a fiction--the last section of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction is, appropriately, the place where Stevens gives it his fullest attention--such a fiction of the end is like infinity plus one and imaginary numbers in mathematics, something we know does not exist, but which helps us to make sense of and to move in the world. Mundo is itself such a fiction. I think Stevens, who certainly thought we have to make our sense out of whatever materials we find to hand, borrowed it from Ortega. His general doctrine of fictions he took from Vaihinge ~ Frank Kermode

Pi is not merely the ubiquitous factor in high school geometry problems; it is stitched across the whole tapestry of mathematics, not just geometry's little corner of it. Pi occupies a key place in trigonometry too. It is intimately related to e, and to imaginary numbers. Pi even shows up in the mathematics of probability ~ Robert Kanigel

One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds? ~ Stephen Hawking

The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.' ~ Dan Brown

Perhaps I don't know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don't know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways-everything, ideas included. If I make an effort to find any difference in them, each of them is the same today as it was yesterday, but as soon as I shut my eyes they're suddenly transformed, in a different light. Perhaps I went wrong about the imaginary numbers. If I get to them by going straight along inside mathematics, so to speak, they seem quite natural. It's only if I look at them directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it. But I wasn't wrong about Basini. I wasn't wrong when I couldn't turn my ear away from the faint trickling sound in the high wall or my eye from the silent, swirling dust going up in the beam of light from a lamp. No, I wasn't wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I-I don't mean it literally-it's not that things are alive, it's not that Basini seemed to have two faces-it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There's something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can't measure out with thou ~ Robert Musil

Whoa, whoa, whoa," I said, not being able to stop myself. "What's the i?"
"The i is an imaginary number," he said, and coughed.
"There are imaginary numbers now?" I said in disbelief. "Are there unicorns in the next lesson? ~ Chris Colfer

Too much of the world's happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another. To increase my standard of living, someone in another part of the world must lower his. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness. Industrialized nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made poor and hungry. It doesn't have to be that way ... ~ Eugene H. Peterson

The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers. ~ Bill Gates

Every new routine I have ever written and performed probably occurred extemporaneously. Then after you have fleshed it out and tried it out in front of a number of audiences and it works, you put it down on paper. ~ Bob Newhart

Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead. ~ Alan Moore

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS

Before you were born,
And were still too tiny for
The human eye to see,
You won the race for life
From among 250 million competitors.
And yet,
How fast you have forgotten
Your strength,
When your very existence
Is proof of your greatness.
You were born a winner,
A warrior,
One who defied the odds
By surviving the most gruesome
Battle of them all.
And now that you are a giant,
Why do you even doubt victory
Against smaller numbers,
And wider margins?
The only walls that exist,
Are those you have placed in your mind.
And whatever obstacles you conceive,
Exist only because you have forgotten
What you have already
Achieved. ~ Suzy Kassem

I was always dressing up as a kid in the backyard, building some sort of fort and having battles against imaginary enemies. It's often that same feeling when you're pretending for a living, but it's with bigger toys. ~ Jai Courtney

I always went into an area that was in last place, with a philosophy, 'You can't fall off the floor.' And I was lucky, was at the right time and the right place, with the right ideas, and each one of these areas became number one. ~ Michael Eisner

Unicorns are real and emo is imaginary. ~ Mikey Way

The shortest way to get to the real answer is via the imaginary ~ Joanna Tilsley

This is an elegant hotel! Room service has an unlisted number. ~ Henny Youngman

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances. ~ George C. Williams

That the West thinks that seven is lucky and the Chinese think eight is shows both that numerology is wrong and that it's popular across the world. Numbers feel mysterious and significant. So all you need to do to sound mysterious and significant is to pick a number, any number. ~ Mark Forsyth

Musk has talked about having more kids, and it's on this subject that he delivers some controversial philosophizing vis-à-vis the creator of Beavis and Butt-head. "There's this point that Mike Judge makes in Idiocracy, which is like smart people, you know, should at least sustain their numbers," Musk said. "Like, if it's a negative Darwinian vector, then obviously that's not a good thing. It should be at least neutral. But if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that's probably bad, too. I mean, Europe, Japan, Russia, China are all headed for demographic implosion. And the fact of the matter is that basically the wealthier - basically wealth, education, and being secular are all indicative of low birth rate. They all correlate with low birth rate. I'm not saying like only smart people should have kids. I'm just saying that smart people should have kids as well. They should at least maintain - at least be a replacement rate. And the fact of the matter is that I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You're like, 'Wow, that's probably not good. ~ Ashlee Vance

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity. ~ Ellen Glasgow

In fact, if he stood here staring at her bottom for very much longer, he would be saluting her with something much more tangible than an imaginary sword. ~ Annie Burrows

Among a hundred windows shining
dully in the vast side
of greater-than-palace number such-and-such
one burns
these several years, each night
as if the room within were aflame. ~ Denise Levertov

Look, let me put it this way: with me, you're number one and there isn't even a number two. ~ Charles Bukowski

You want to know how to stop this killer? Forgive yourself, and he'll
disappear from your life forever."
"Thanks. I'll be sure to do that."
And I know:
1. This is almost the same conversation I've had with myself many times
before.
2. Gordon's only trying to help.
But it doesn't matter.
I:
1. Say, "See you later."
2. Step outside.
3. Close the door.
I don't want to, really. I want to go back inside and believe Gordon's words,
like a child believing in a fairy tale, and I want to escape this nightmare forever.
But I can't.
I realize now that it's easy to tell the difference between a real problem and
an imaginary one.
It's just the terror of facing the truth that's hard. ~ Jeremy C. Shipp

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison. ~ Bruce Chatwin

There are a lot of comedic actors who are just out to be the funny one and get all the laughs and they'll sacrifice your joke, the scene, the story just to be the star. All they want is attention and to be number one. You can spot those guys from a mile away and they're the worst. ~ Jake M. Johnson

We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions. ~ Ezekiel Emanuel

One recent study performed by the American Medical Association and published in the _Archives of Internal Medicine_ in January 2012 demonstrated an astounding 48 percent increased risk of diabetes among women taking statin medications.

This study involved big numbers -- more than one hundred sixty thousand postmenopausal women -- making it hard to ignore its significance and gravity. Recognizing that type 2 diabetes is a powerful risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, a relationship between statin drugs and cognitive decline or cognitive dysfunction is certainly understandable.
~ David Perlmutter, M.D., _Grain Brain_ ~ David Perlmutter

Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any par­ticular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a neg­ligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the peo­ple, far off at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey. ~ Aldous Huxley

There are, almost by definition, an unlimited number of Hells - potentially at least a personal one for every living sapient being. ~ Terry Pratchett

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam. One moment it was a calculating machine. The next, it thought. ~ China Mieville

Distance from the troubled past is the product of economic and social change more than reflection or the mere passage of time, which may have little effect. To the extent that the basic circumstances of life remain unchanged, time becomes irrelevant; in fact, it may even deepen the hold of former attitudes, turning them into ancient truths. But as the foundations of social reality alter and the circumstances of daily life take on a new character, society can more easily accept hard truths and discard old controversies. It gains an ability to leave its past in the past and move into a different future.

[...] The desire of a few individuals to "overcome the past," to rise above enmity and engage a different future after a destructive war, is laudable but rarely is achievable for an entire society. Substantial numbers of people will defend old positions or insist on the validity of their grievances, and the next generation may revive propaganda or condemn efforts to "forget." Eventually, however, the world moves on, and changed realities allow acceptance of bitter truths about a troubled past. As progressively greater numbers acknowledge the past, historical wounds close, even those of bloody civil war [192 - 93]. ~ Paul D. Escott

The ABCs of Death offers us a chance to work closely with a large number of visionary filmmakers to create a film with more jaw-dropping moments than a whole summer of blockbusters. ~ Tim League

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories. ~ Joshua Foer

Though combinations are without number, the number of ideas are limited. ~ Eugene Znosko-Borovsky

The old and oft-repeated proposition "Totum est majus sua parte" [the whole is larger than the part] may be applied without proof only in the case of entities that are based upon whole and part; then and only then is it an undeniable consequence of the concepts "totum" and "pars". Unfortunately, however, this "axiom" is used innumerably often without any basis and in neglect of the necessary distinction between "reality" and "quantity", on the one hand, and "number" and "set", on the other, precisely in the sense in which it is generally false. ~ Georg Cantor