AMA | September 2024

8006.004 - 8030.738 Sean Carroll

You know, there's a lot of things like what a cosine and a sine are that go into that kind of identity. How there is a natural way of coordinate-izing the set of complex numbers using trigonometry is, you know, highly non-trivial. But then once you do it, once you set it up, then it's all trivial, right? So that's the sense in which they're both onto something and missing something.