Joris Vankerschaver

@jvkersch.bsky.social

Applied mathematician at Ghent University Global Campus in Incheon, South Korea. Former scientific software developer, Python coder.

Casually leafing through Leibniz's papers, as one does, and was surprised to see these astronomical symbols ☽☉ used as shorthand. Looking forward to using these, as well as ☿♃♆ etc in my calculus class.

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Started reading Paul Nahin's "An Imaginary Tale: The Story of √-1" in preparation for teaching about complex numbers. Somehow I had never seen the derivation of the formula for the roots of a cubic, and was surprised at how easy it was to follow -- and how magical it must have been to derive.

Recently I got a citation alert for a paper that extended a result of mine from 2010. Upon closer inspection it turns out that the authors are from North Korea. Crazy that we are a mere 250 kilometers apart but we may be as well on a different planet.

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