Tarkblog

When I was doing my graduate work, I had one professor whom I despised much more than any other. I won’t reveal his name or what class he taught, though it was an engineering related course.

The guy was completely awful. However, the one highlight of the class is that he taught me a technical word that I hadn’t used or heard before and that I, for whatever reason, really like.

That word is nilpotent.

In math terms, a nilpotent matrix is an n x n matrix that if you multiply by itself a number of times ends up turning into all 0s. It turns out the maximum number of times you can multiply by itself to get all 0s is n. It also has some interesting eigenvalue properties (namely that they are all 0s).

Nonetheless, I think nilpotent is a very cool word. It just sounds sophisticated. I can’t think of any use for it other than just sounding sophsticated. Knowing it, and how to use it, makes you a member of an elite club of people who can harness the power of the word. nilpotent.

Just don’t confuse it with potentate.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.