Tag: magnitude

In mathematics, magnitude is the “size” of a mathematical object, a property by which the object can be compared as larger or smaller than other objects of the same kind. More formally, an object’s magnitude is an ordering (or ranking) of the class of objects to which it belongs.
The Greeks distinguished between several types of magnitude, including:
They proved that the first two could not be the same, or even isomorphic systems of magnitude. They did not consider negative magnitudes to be meaningful, and magnitude is still chiefly used in contexts in which zero is either the lowest size or less than all possible sizes.
The magnitude of any number x is usually called its “absolute value” or “modulus”, denoted by |x|.
The absolute value of a real number r is defined by:
It may be thought of as the number’s distance from zero on the real number line. For example, the absolute value of both 7 and −7 is 7.
A complex number z may be viewed as the position of a point P in a 2-dimensional…