Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.inglese
Titolo: Imaginary Humour (Era: If you are a landing istitution...)

...
:Italian humour's very different from English/American humour.
I'm Italian, as such, or, maybe, as in the course of these years I've
been undergoing a slow and yet irreversible decerebration process, it
seems I can no longer make out an Anglo-Saxon newspaperman punning on
words :-(((see post above: "Caring for the English...). However
considering the latter of the above-mentioned surmises the more
plausible (the former cannot be 'cause, albeit my italian handicap, I
got Bambi's irony straight off and I laughed heartily at her "The Pope
goes to Heaven"), I feel to be consonant with Arianna about Paolo's
humour, it leaves me somewhat... discomposed. ( Or might it be for my
tipically Italian bad grounding in Maths? :-)))
Betty.
****
"I think not", said Descartes, and promptly disappeared.

 tipically Italian bad grounding in Maths? :-)))
may I consider this as a congratulation?
truly yours
	-p-


it leaves me somewhat... discomposed.
Discomposed?  I like that word.  I think I'll make it part of my active
vocabulary.  As far as the joke goes, it must have been a "man" joke
because not too many of the women in the group got it.
ciao
Arianna
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Dear Betty,
Discomposed.
As in discombobulated?
I remain, as always, ecc
Bambi
dtb


tipically Italian bad grounding in Maths? :-)))
Mathematicians can be strange people. And they share a different kind of
humor.
It is possible to catch them laughing for appearently no reason. For
example:
four mathematicians meet somewhere, look silently at each other and then one
of them says: "Hey, we form a finite group". You can be pretty sure they'll
laugh, or at least chuckle.
Certe battute poi sono solo settoriali. Ad esempio, se mi chiedi come va, io
potrei risponderti, a seconda dei casi:
"A Lagrange!", oppure "Cauchy Cauchy"
ma se non conosci i due tizi in questione dubito che rideresti (anche solo
pensando : "ma quanto è scemo questo...")
BTW, queste temo siano intraducibili.
saluti complessi e pure coniugati,
Peltio
P.S.
Is NASA a landing institution?
___
Topologists do it openly and compactly.
Moebius did it always on the same side.
Fermat did it but could not prove it.

ma se non conosci i due tizi in questione dubito che rideresti
Ad un livello molto piu' basso, nel mio mondo (nastri adesivi) quando
qualcuno chiede come va, la battuta standard e' 'a rotoli'. Ovviamente fa
ridere solo noi.
Scusate l'OT.
Isa
Work like you don't need money,
Love like you've never been hurt,
And dance like no one's watching

I had a careful reading of your posts about imaginary numbers. Just
for completion, I'd want to do some remarks. First of all, in modern
mathematics, they're often called "complex numbers" rather than
"imaginary numbers".
The second remark is an hystorical remarks and it's led to give an
idea of why they're called "imaginary".
This term has been used since the middle of the 17th century. As
opposed to these numbers, all ordinary numbers were called "real
numbers".(*) Such an opposition of "real" and "imaginary" is found
probably for the first time in the "Geometrie" of Descartes
(Leyden,1637) The reason they were given such a name is to be found in
the fact it's impossible to find a real number satisfying such an
equation as x^2+2=0. The first to note such an impossibility was
Girolamo Cardano in 1545. He devoleped, however, a naive method to
deal with such equation, solving it with the use of the roots of
negative numbers, as Elzevier Garamond pointed out (BTW, has your name
anything to do with "Il pendolo di Foucault" ?)
Cardano also noticed that  one  could operate with these expressions
just following the usual rules of the ordinary real numbers. Nothing
were known, however, about the meaning of these expressions. From then
on, they were used more and more often  just for their simplicity and
the easy way they provided to deal with difficult problems. 
Only by the turn of the 18th century, thanks to the independent works
of Wessel, Argand, Gauss and Hamilton, it was given a sistematic
interpretation of these numbers.
Hoping to have been useful (?)
Bye
Michele
(*) Most undergraduate students often mistakenly (?)  call imaginary
numbers  "unreal". They're not so far from the original meaning