Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2018 August 10
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August 10[edit]
Cartesian axes of a rhomboid graph[edit]
How would one describe the Cartesian axes in the chart at the top right of the article Nolan Chart? Would one describe the Personal axis as the x-axis and the Economic axis as the y-axis? Or vice versa, perhaps? I suppose one could say "top quadrant", "right quadrant", "bottom quadrant", "left quadrant", but what terminology could be used for the axes? Would someone more hippieish be described as having a higher value or a lower one on the Personal axis than a straight-as-a-banker type? And if one does descirbe the axes with the terms x-axis and y-axis, how does one explain that they are turned 45° from their usual positions? Khemehekis (talk) 04:59, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
- I would just call them the Personal axis and the Economic axis. Loraof (talk) 20:46, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
- Keep in mind that the labels x and y on the axes, and their orientations are just conventions so we can talk about them sensibly. Any two perpendicular lines can be chosen as x and y and it's a matter of turning the piece of paper around and/or turning it over to get the conventional orientation. In applications, any two variables can be used regardless of geometrical interpretation, e.g. time or pH. The hippy vs. banker thing seems to me a matter of interpretation and I'm not an economist. Similarly, the reason for the angle change is a matter of interpretation, but presumably it's to keep the usual labels of left and right on the political spectrum where you'd think they belong. --RDBury (talk) 09:43, 11 August 2018 (UTC)