That conclusion comes from researchers at Duke University, who set out to see if they could use the social graph to accurately plot the ideological affiliations of political candidates.

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Those things are a bit more difficult to plot on a graph.

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And, as Euler's successor, Carl Friedrich Gauss, was to discover, if you plot real numbers on one axis of a graph and imaginary ones on the other, you create a plane that represents both sorts of numbers.

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First let's plot the pace of technological progress and wealth creation throughout history on an imaginary graph.

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