Stone cold legend Vi Hart

When I was young I thought that 1 was prime. The guy who explained that it wasn’t just said “they just decided that it’s not prime, a lot of stuff works out better that way”. A good, succint “a wizard did it” explanation that satisified me (after all, it had worked out for i, j, k and so on, I didn’t trip out over the name “imaginary” and it pretty immediately turned out to be useful) and over the years I found that it was true, that a lot of things really did work out better.

But reading Lamb’s essay, I see that a wizard really did do it, i.e. that it really was something thst the math community actually decided rather than calculated out.