As recently as the 18th century, it was common practice to ignore any negative results returned by equations on the assumption that they were meaningless, just as René Descartes did with negative solutions in a Cartesian coordinate system.
Så sent som på 1700-talet var det vanligt att ignorera eventuella negativa lösningar till ekvationer på antagandet att de var meningslösa, precis som René Descartes gjorde med negativa lösningar i det kartesiska koordinatsystemet.