TLDR
No idea what it means but;
Get Real;
Be Rational, Get Real
Posted on
January 3, 2010 by
Mr. Chase
One present I got for my dad this Christmas was a t-shirt with this funny image on it. Perhaps you’ve seen this on a poster or t-shirt before. It’s very amusing. But my dad pointed out a bit of the irony I hadn’t noticed before.
For
to tell
to “be rational” is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. Can you think why? If you remember what a rational number is, you’ll remember it’s a subset of the real numbers. No imaginary number is “rational” in the typical sense. So
could just as easily say “be rational” to
.
You might have an intuitive sense for what might make a complex number “rational” though. You might say, if the real and imaginary part are both rational, then the complex number is “kind of” rational. Mathematicians call these “[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_rational[/ame].”