On 11 October 2013 12:27, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Fri, 11 Oct 2013 00:25:27 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 12:09 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: >>> BTW, one of the earliest things that turned me on to Python was when I >>> discovered that it uses j as the imaginary unit, not i. All >>> right-thinking people will agree with me on this. >> >> I've never been well-up on complex numbers; can you elaborate on this, >> please? All I know is that I was taught that the square root of -1 is >> called i, and that hypercomplex numbers include i, j, k, and maybe even >> other terms, and I never understood where j comes from. Why is Python >> better for using j? > > Being simple souls and not Real Mathematicians, electrical engineers get > confused by the similarity between I (current) and i (square root of -1), > so they used j instead. [...] > <wink>
No, electrical engineers need many symbols for current for the same reason that eskimos need many words for snow :) [*] [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
