Can
you find a number such that when you square your
number, the answer is -1?
Sounds impossible…negative
times negative equals positive is what we learn
at school.
No ordinary number can be
squared to get to -1. But imagine there might
be a new number that we hadn't discovered before
that could answer this problem. Is this creation
or discovery…
It took the revolutionary
years in France for people finally to accept the
idea of a new number, called an imaginary number
and denoted by the symbol i.
Once we have one imaginary
number, mathematicians built many more by taking
combinations of ordinary numbers with this imaginary
number. For example, 5+6i is another imaginary
number. It is possible to do arithmetic with these
numbers, i.e. add, multiply, divide, even raise
numbers to the power of imaginary numbers.
|
