More Vampire Math: Vampires Are Imaginary Numbers

Malcontent Wes popped into the comments of our recent post on the mathematical improbability of vampires with a link to a blog post with a great math-vampire analogy: vampires are the imaginary numbers of the supernatural world.

Imaginary numbers don't exist. To poncey urban sophisticates sipping their lattes far from haunted Romanian forests where the blood-sucking undead are a stark, nightmarish reality, vampires don't exist either. Nevertheless, we can agree on certain characters that both imaginary numbers and vampires have. Vampires hate sunlight, they drink blood, they sleep in coffins, etc.

Neither vampires nor imaginary numbers exist, yet we treat them like they do, simply because it suits our purposes. Imaginary numbers let us posit hypothetical mathematical scenarios; vampires let us imagine hypothetical human scenarios. Want an addiction analogy? Vampires. Epidemic? Vampires. Alienation? Vampires. Need to have your protagonist exist both now and two hundred years in the past? Just make him a vampire.

And, of course, vampires are negative enantiomorphs of human beings, just like imaginary numbers are often negative enantiomorphs of real numbers.

Which proves... something, I guess. Don't you love it when you spend your day encouraging your synapses to randomly misfire? Thanks to Wes, Dracula, Math and Booze!

Vampires are the imaginary numbers of modern literature [John August]