Talk:179: e to the pi times i

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This is one of the few comics that were changed after release, as stated by Randall in his XKCD book. It first claimed e^(i*Pi) = 1, which lead to huge protest from the community and a correction from Randall. --Gefrierbrand (talk) 09:47, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

He must have been pie-eyed when he wrote that; he's usually pretty good about his math... -- IronyChef (talk) 05:09, 7 November 2012 (UTC)
I see what you did there. Daddy (talk) 15:18, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Randall says in the title text that he's never been satisfied with explanations of the sinusoidal nature of the function of e^ix. http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/questionCorner/epii.html really helps, at least for those who are obsessed with taylor series yet tragically horrible at math. --Jolbucley (talk) 03:39, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Why e to the ix gives a sinusoidal wave? This is because neutrinos keep oscillating. They wouldn't without the e^ix support... 162.158.83.72 04:01, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Actually, e to the ix isn't sinusoidal. "Consisting of sinusoidal components" doesn't make it sinusoidal, any more than it does for any relation representable by Fourier Transform. As with the other mistake, it seems to indicate that this really wasn't something Randall knew about.

Technically i isn't "imaginary" at all, but is incorporated into equations to represent rotations perpendicular to the x-y plane. 108.162.210.220 15:51, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

i is imaginary. Both "real" and "imaginary" are terms of art in a mathematical context that have nothing to do with the reality or unreality of the numbers in question. Also, when you're talking about the complex plane, it doesn't have x and y axes: it has real and imaginary axes. But of course, nobody can stop you from defining a mapping from the complex plane to any other vector space if that suits your purpose. 162.158.62.45 01:58, 6 September 2018 (UTC)