Monk’s ‘Startling’ Math Discovery

Monk Discovered Mathematical Formula 700 Years Earlier Than Previously Thought

These are numbers of the form a + bi, where a and b are what we normally think of as real numbers, and i, a so- called imaginary number, is the square root of -1.

Spiritual, Profane and Complex.

Incredibly these numbers would not become a part of mathematical practice for another 500 years, but Udo of Aachen wrote of the intertwined spiritual and profane parts of all entities, including numbers, and through some scrim of theological reasoning, he concluded that the product of two purely profane numbers was a negative spiritual number, just as i² = -1.

In this way Udo derived rules for dealing with profane/spiritual numbers that were essentially identical to those used today for manipulating complex numbers.

Using these rules, more theology (a number multiplied by itself is somehow the analogue of spiritual reflection), and repeatedly substituting complex numbers into the expression z² + c to determine their “fate” eventually led Udo of Aachen to the Mandelbrot set.

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