Current politics has made me take more notice of several politicians' imaginary numbers -- far from fact and human needs. And, after a while -- to relax -- my mind moved on to the imaginary numbers of mathematics, and I found (at the PoetrySoup website) this poem which I'd like to share.
Imaginary Numbers by Robert Pettit
Anybody can consider this statement as moot:
Negative real numbers cannot have a square root.
When working with real numbers with values less than zero,
the squared product will be positive; so where do you go?
In a parabola, all points except zero lie above the x-axis.
Many students get confused because of this.
This placed mathematicians in a bit of a quandary.
That was until numbers were invented that are imaginary.
I did not find online biographical information about poet Pettit but I did find this link to his many many poems available at PoetrySoup -- a list going back all the way to 2010. AND here is a link to his 2010 limerick, "Seventeen."
This link leads to previous mentions of imaginary numbers in this blog.
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