Visualising Complex Polynomials: A Parabola Is but a Drop in the Ocean of Quadratics
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the problems encountered when teaching complex numbers arises from an inability to visualise the complex roots, the so-called "imaginary" roots of a polynomial. Being four dimensional, it is problematic to visualize graphs and roots of polynomials with complex coefficients in spite of many attempts through centuries. An innovative way is described to visualize the graphs and roots of functions, by restricting the domain of the complex function to those complex numbers that map onto real values, leading to the concept of three dimensional sibling curves. Using this approach we see that a parabola is but a singular case of a complex quadratic.  We see that sibling curves of a complex quadratic lie on a three-dimensional hyperbolic paraboloid. Finally, we show that the restriction to a real range causes no loss of generality.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it