Shouldn't it be the square root of the negative number?
yes. Which just goes to show that I don't translate visual information very well into text. Nor edit very well when working back into symbolic form, clearly.
LOL.
That joke works better with the square root of negative one, not sqrt(-2), though, IMHO, so that each participant has (morally ;-) just one of the faults alluded to. Poor sqt(-2) has both, breaking the balance of the joke.
My offerings are paraphrasesof things that were told to me as a child, which still seem true:
Mathematics is the king of the arts and the queen of the sciences.
Maths is the art of being lazy - mathematicians are always on the look out for an easier way to work things out, and much of maths has been developed for this purpose.
Maths is fun!
