Often when I am making small talk with people, I ask them if they are "Keepin’ it real". One day, at a math team meeting while I was writing on the white board, a friend asked me if I was "Keepin’ it real". I told him that of course I was, there wasn’t a single imaginary number on the board. One thing led to another, and thinking back to that time, I realized I had come up with a witty and original t-shirt idea.
Originally, the idea for the t-shirt was to have an i inside the circle with the line. i, as you know, is the symbol for the square root of negative one, which is an imaginary number. The opposite of an imaginary number is a real number. Thus, when we have no i’s, we are, by definition, keeping it real.
The problem is, not that many people look at a cursive i and think, "Oh, an imaginary number!". Actually, not that many people even know what an imaginary number is at all. Still, some polling of my friends concluded that more people more quickly associated sqrt(-1) with imaginary numbers than i. So I redesigned the shirt with sqrt(-1) instead.
I’ll have pictures of the shirt as soon as mine gets in. Click either of the pictures below for a larger resolution, or check out my CafePress store where you can buy one of these beauties.
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