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Genshed t1_j6b7ngm wrote

Reply to comment by macedonianmoper in ELI5: Why do imaginary numbers even need to exist? by Tharsis101

I can't imagine an engineering degree I could have done.

Background: I went to high school in the late 1970s. We had geometry (Euclid style, not Descartes) and an algebra class for the students who were going to university.

Took an accelerated trigonometry class during summer bridge, and then failed Calculus I three times my freshman year.

That's when I shifted my academic goals from the natural sciences to history. I still retain my youthful enthusiasm for the sciences, which is why I learned about complex numbers in the first place.

Most of my friends view my ongoing efforts to understand mathematics as a charming eccentricity. As my eldest brother put it, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, 'all logarithms are quite useless.'

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macedonianmoper t1_j6b9mpy wrote

Ah I see, then it's totally understandable, unlike fractions and negatives they don't really serve a purpose for day to day.

Education changes from place to place, I see a lot of people apparently had calculus in highschool while I only started it in college (this was only a few years ago), I did however learn about imaginary numbers in high school

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lunatickoala t1_j6civq4 wrote

It's interesting how "useful day to day" can change so much in context. Logarithms are the basis for how slide rules work so in the time before personal computers when logarithms were more useful then than today.

And while most people don't actively use logarithms in their day to day life, they are incredibly important because human perception is generally logarithmic, not linear. The decibel scale is logarithmic because of this. There's even some evidence to suggest that logarithmic thinking might even be more natural. https://news.mit.edu/2012/thinking-logarithmically-1005

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