When I first learnt complex numbers in school, I couldn't understand their purpose or why they are called imaginary etc.
I checked where they are used and found examples of current, magnetism etc. But I couldn't understand, electricity is a measurable physical quantity, how can you use imaginary numbers there??
Then I searched internet and found a Stack Exchange answer telling the story and how, instead of, complex (sounds like difficult) or imaginary (sounds like not useful practically), if we had better terms for them, then it would have been easier for beginners to understand them more intuitively.
It's completely true in my case.
After learning usage of vectors, thanks to Godot, for rotation and movement, and then about matrix etc. I now feel like "complex" numbers etc. are the representation of data through multiple numbers where a single value (scalars) is not enough. I may not be right in strict mathematics terms, but at least that's how I was able to understand them.
I think it would have been clearer if they weren't called "numbers".
For example, look at matrices [1]: no one asks themselves whether they are "real" or not. We know that we have defined operations on arrays of numbers which are useful to some degree.
If complex numbers were just called "complexes", a lot of confusion would just wither away.
Also, interestingly, quaternions and octonions aren't called "numbers".
[1] Complex numbers may, of course, be seen as special kinds of matrices, but this is beside my point here.
I guess what counts as a number is arguable. But -1 is a number, and yet it has two parts: the natural number, and the sign. Sqrt(2) is a number, and yet it cannot be written down exactly. It requires an algebraic representation.
Generally, I think we use the word "number" for mathematical objects that have some notions we associate with the natural number (which are what we most intuitively understand as numbers), like ordering, summation, a notion of zero, etc. Complex numbers do not have all of these, but they have enough that we consider them numbers.
Another way to think of this: most of these non-natural numbers arose as a way of being able to represent results of basic operations on natural numbers, that are not themselves natural numbers. These results could sometimes be operated on further to yield a natural number again. But if we did not invent new numbers for these, these result were not easily expressible, and led to gaps in our math frameworks. In fact, a lot of math progress was hampered by not recognizing these numbers, and progress followed once they were recognized. And the reason we call them numbers is that they arise from basic algebraic operations on natural numbers.
Imaginary numbers never made sense to me in high school. But this book gradually builds it up in a way that made the conclusion positively intuïtive. Highly recommended!
To me their purpose only came clearly recently. They're just a way to rotate smoothly one dimension into another. And control the speed of the rotation.
x into y. Potential energy to kinetic energy. Charge into current.
Keeping this definition but going higher in the dimensions: x into y, y into z and z into x. Going meta, the x into y rotation defines a plane; And a plane going into another direction is a volume. (x into y) into z.
What made it click, what made it beautiful is Geometric Algebra:
I've come to understand it as something with both a magnitude and a phase. When you have a unity sine wave, it has two points per period where the magnitude is zero but those points have different phases.
Calculus is a mathematical model of the world, and it is wrong in the sense of the famous quote about "all models [being] wrong, but some are useful", so mathematicians used the imaginary unit almost like a hotfix for their model.
Whether that's an accurate/rigorous statement or not, it helped me as a learner.
You can, of course, express things like oscillation without i, using vectors and matrices. But the ability to use Euler's formula to express complicated sinusoids as compact exponentials with base e simply makes the analysis much easier. In the words of my prof, it's merely a mathematical structure to express things more easily that "regular calculus" isn't good at expressing.
To me, that made the apparent paradoxes of expressing e.g. phase angles and reactive power and stuff using i a lot easier to stomach.
I mean the guy has a PhD in mathematics so I'm sure he understands his tools deeply. Certainly more deeply than I did when I was an undergraduate in his class. Sometimes the right analogy, even if imperfect, is more helpful to build intuition than pages of rigorous proofs. Chill out.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to keep arguing about this. I’m not going to go back to my Alma Mater and tell the prof that some nobody on hacker news doesn’t like an analogy he used 12 years ago.
Whatever point you’re trying to make is not working.
Im sorry if I come across as aggressive, Im myself chill and just here to talk, share and discover new things. Analogies are essential to learning I agree with you
The good old "if only they named it differently it would be easy".
It's just not true. Mathematics is far deeper and richer than pretty much any other field. The naming of things is not stopping you from understanding it, but the sheer magnitude of it. Yes, as an adult it's easy to give a new look at the things you were flooded with in college and understand a tiny fraction of it with time and no pressure, and conclude it was easy all along "if only it was done like ..."
Go ahead and keep trying to learn for weeks with fast pace and kind of crappy material, and you'll remember why it actually was difficult.
Agreed, the naming system is atrocious. The one that really pisses me off at this point is that "real" numbers get to be called that. Imaginary numbers with rational coefficients are SIGNIFICANTLY more "real" than a converging infinite series, imo
This article misses one of the most useful and deep representations for complex numbers: polar coordinates. There’s some bits in there about adding angles and such when multiplying, but it turns out these are “obvious” in polar notation.
A complex number can be expressed in Cartesian coordinates as (x,y) or x+yi. It can be expressed as polar coordinates as (r,theta). What’s the corresponding complex notation? Surprisingly, it’s r*e^(i theta), where the angle is taken in radians. It might seem really weird to see an exponential there, but it turns out that the exponential behaves like a trig function when given an imaginary exponent - to be precise, e^(i theta) = cos theta + i sin theta.
Now multiplication becomes easy: multiplying two polar-notation complex numbers (r1,t1) x (r2,t2) gives r1r2 e^(i (t1+t2)) following the usual rules of exponential arithmetic, i.e. (r1r1, t1+t2).
The complex exponential looks like a very strange notation at first because we’re all used to grade school exponents, but you can think of it as a function that takes an angle and produces a point on the unit circle. Feed it a continuous input, and it traces out an arc or a circle. sin and cos are merely the one-dimensional projections of this function.
Frequency becomes simply e^(i ft) where f is the frequency in radians and t is time - representing a point racing around a circle at a set speed. Multiplying two signals with different (complex) frequencies produces a new signal with the sum of their frequencies. With this notation, complex signals are the simple ones to understand - real signals are the “more complex” ones, as every real signal consists of a complex signal added to its conjugate.
The "visual intro" misses a lot, and wastes half the space by introducing the complex numbers algebraically without a single visual because it's LLM slop.
A "visual intro" that doesn't even mention Mobius transformations[1] or Riemann surfaces [2] or any of the beautiful, colorful ways to visualize complex functions [3], or..
..well, it's just lazy LLM slop.
Is it better than the average high school introduction to the subject?
You’ve asserted several times in this thread that this is “LLM slop”. Having read a decent amount of math content on the internet, I’m not sure I quite agree, so I’d like to hear why you think it’s LLM slop?
For one, this article has (charmingly?) terrible math rendering, rather reminiscent of someone copy-pasting random pictures of equations from the Internet and supplementing them with Word’s Equation Editor or something. An LLM would have just dumped a pile of LaTeX and called it a day. For another, I don’t sense any of the usual writing tics that are suggestive of LLM writing. I don’t claim either of those are remotely definitive, but my personal feeling is that this was largely hand-written and aimed at a very introductory level (i.e. not the sort of level that will benefit from knowing about Riemann surfaces).
Do you want to get into a sentence-by-sentence analysis?
> I’m not sure I quite agree, so I’d like to hear why you think it’s LLM slop?
I have pointed out one reason: because the text titled "visual introduction" lacks visuals, and the introduction of complex number in it is purely algebraic without a single picture.
The numbers are introduced algebraically, and then explained visually, after the reader was already confused. You only get anything out of this if you already know complex numbers well enough; in which case it's not an introduction anyway.
The author says, quote "I did use AI assistance for some of the components", so I hope this settles the discussion as to whether it's AI slop or not.
It's not AI slop -- I wrote it and it took quite a long time to write. I did use AI assistance for some of the components and indeed you are right: I did copy paste images (that I mostly generated myself) to try to introduce the concepts in a better way although some people will always have criticisms of almost anything so I take a lot of stuff posted on forums with a grain of salt. It's good to remember behind the wires it is us humans (for the most part) trying to communicate after all and trying to help others. Hopefully the write-up did help some people get the concepts -- I tried to write it in a form that I thought would have helped me more had I had the chance of being reintroduced to imaginary numbers -- a lot of the concepts I included in the write-up were not taught to me when I initially encountered them and I wish they had been.
For an interactive approach I built this some time ago. [1]
It allows putting complex numbers on the complex plane and doing addition, multiplication and exponentiation via drag and drop. It provides some intuition for addition==translation and multiplication==scale-rotation.
But when you represent a complex number as a+bi, what's the meaning of '+' there? In Argand diagram, the numbers are coordinates. Why do you sum up coordinates?
More fundamentally what's addition and multiplication? Is there a continuity between them, like an operator that represents both addition and multiplication meeting them half-way?
What's the significance of square and square root? Aren't they just some exponent values (2, 1/2) which have no particular significance on the real line? Why should imaginary numbers have a special place if they are tied to square roots (exponent of 0.5)?
People use sums to denote vector components, too. It's common to see ai + bj + ck (pretend there are hats on i, j, and k) to mean the vector [a b c].
So with complex numbers, you can think of it as a vector aj + bi where j and i are basis vectors, but we call j "1", because complex numbers have a notion of multiplication, and in that notion, j acts like 1, in that zj = jz = z for any complex number z.
Nothing bad happens if you write all complex numbers a + bi as vectors or tuples [a b]. It's just less convenient.
In your example 3 and 2 belong to different dimensions. you could write "3x + 2y" to express 3 steps along the x axis and 2 along the y axis. Just writing "3+2" would lead to the expectation that 5 could be calculated as reasonable result, which would not be the case.
Mathematicians often reuse the same notation for different things where it's clear (for the mathematicians) what the implied meaning is. That means however that non-mathematicians can get confused.
The plus here is the operation that we call "the sum of complex numbers", where the numbers are a and bi. We can work towards this by first defining complex numbers as a tuple of two real numbers with particular sum and multiplication laws for these tuples. So (a, b) + (c, d) = (a + b, c + d) where the left side plus is for complex numbers and the right side plus is for real numbers. Similarly for multiplication, (a, b) * (c, d) = (ac - bd, bc + ad).
We associate (1,0) with the real number 1, and similarly for tuples of the form (a,0). The association is what allows us to see the real numbers as a subset of the complex numbers rather than being some unrelated set. It makes sense because the set of tuples of the form (a,0) with the multiplication laws of complex numbers behaves the same way as the real numbers and is in 1:1 correspondence with them. This association is used every time we write (a,0) as a(1,0) or just "a". We also write (0,b) as b(0,1) since (b,0)*(0,1) = (0,b), from the multiplication law. A general tuple (a, b) then can be written as (a,0) + (0,b) or, as what we've said is the same thing, a + b(0,1). Now we have simplified notation for all of these things except (0,1). It follows from the multiplication law that (0,1)*(0,1) = -(1,0) = -1. The complex number whose square is -1 is denoted as i. All these simplifications allow you to write (a,b) as a + bi.
> More fundamentally what's addition and multiplication? Is there a continuity between them, like an operator that represents both addition and multiplication meeting them half-way?
I'm not personally aware of any concept of continuity between these operations. In abstract algebra, operations are fundamental to an algebraic structure. The field of real numbers or the field of complex numbers are algebraic structures defined by their elements, the binary operation called addition, the binary operation called multiplication, and the laws that these operations satisfy. For example, both are commutative and associative, but the distribution law shows that they're different: a*(b+c) = a*b + a*c, but not a+b*c = (a+b)*(a+c). Also, a+0 = a, but a*1 = a, so the operations have different special elements that "fix" the other element when an operation is applied. It may be interesting to think what a "half-way operator" would have to be like with respect to these laws.
>What's the significance of square and square root? Aren't they just some exponent values (2, 1/2) which have no particular significance on the real line?
The idea of complex numbers and the more general idea of field extensions, which describes the process of obtaining complex numbers from reals, came from the study of polynomials. Polynomials can only have terms of integer degree. They satisfy many nice properties and quite rich mathematical structures arise from them which would not be possible with general non-integer degrees. Second degree polynomials with real coefficients, like x^2 + 1, are the lowest-degree polynomials such that they may not have real roots, and x^2 + 1 is the simplest example, but any other polynomial can be used to produce the complex numbers as well, if has a factor like x^2 + a. This is where the 2 comes from. It's not significant from a real line perspective (2 is just a number among the infinite reals) but it's significant from an algebraic one.
If you know linear algebra: it works this way because the operations 1 (moving one step right) and i (moving one step right) form a basis[1] for the vector space of translations in a plane.
In simpler terms, it works this way because you can combine the move operations in any order (we can understand that easily), and so we can:
1. Write each move operation as "move ___ left/right and __ up/down"
2. Add up left/right and up/down components separately
>More fundamentally what's addition and multiplication?
We are treating numbers here as translation operators, i.e. commands: "move by this much".
Addition is composition, i.e. doing commands in order (which, turns out, doesn't matter).
Multiplication - well, that's where the salt of the article is. Or rather, should have been.
First, let's look at multiplication of "real" numbers.
Geometrically, the operation is proportional scaling. You can think of it as redefining the unit.
Say, we agreed that "3" means "make 3 steps to the right". But for that to make sense, we need to know what a step is.
We can define, by decree, that a step on a chess board is one cell (1). So "3" by itself really means "3 * 1" (3 of 1 step to the right).
We can scale a number by changing the step size; defined geometrically by proportion:
(a * b) is a distance such that (a * b) : b = a : 1.
This might seem weird, but that's how Euclid would've done it, because it allows us to think of a and b as quantities of equal kind (geometric lengths), avoiding distinguishing geometric quantities, like lengths and translation operators (aka vectors), and scalars, i.e. quantities you can scale by.
Side note: vector literally means "carriers", because the vector operation (translation) moves something from one place to another. A mosquito is a malaria vector.
scaling (multiplication) and adding (composition) interact in a familiar way:
c(a + b) = ca + cb
This is fine and dandy as long as we have only one dimension to deal with.
When we have two, we can first restrict ourselves to multiplying by "real" numbers, because we can say that multiplying by a is simply making everything a times bigger or smaller, and it doesn't break anything.
You still get the same interplay of addition and multiplication.
If we want to keep all the other niceties that we had from real numbers, we will be forced to have the following meaning of multiplication of couples of them (i.e. 2D vectors, translations in a plane):
To get a product of two 2D vectors, u and v, you ADD the angles that u and v make with the x-axis, and you MULTIPLY their lengths.
If you denote this operation as u * v, then you have all the rules for * and + that worked for real numbers still working.
It turns out, essentially, that there's no other way to cook up a product of 2D vectors that has these properties.
And that for 3D vectors, there is no such way at all, a consequence of the Hairy Ball Theorem[5].
And that for 4D vectors, you can define a product rule of that sort only if you give up on the order not mattering. For real and complex numbers, a * b = b * a, but in 4D, the order matters.
And for other dimensions, you really don't get anything nice.
Dimensions 1, 2, and 4 are special; but 2 more so than others.
> Is there a continuity between them, like an operator that represents both addition and multiplication meeting them half-way?
There is a continuity between addition and multiplication.
You can define multiplication of integers by treating one as "number of times to do a thing" and the other as "distance to translate by":
3 * 5 = (move by 3 steps to the right 5 times)
= (move by 5 steps to the right 3 times)
You get rational numbers from this, and real numbers by completion.
So real number multiplication flows from real number addition by continuity.
Another connection is that multiplication of powers is addition of exponents:
a^n * a^m = a^(n + m).
a^n = a * a * a ... * a (n times)
This is how you can define exponentiation. There are other ways. But that's to say that addition and multiplication are inherently inseparable when it comes to real numbers because an integer can be thought of as either a length or a count (that's to say, in 1D vector are scalars), and keeping that puts a lot of structure on what you do.
I think the true spirit of your question deserves this answer though:
Complex multiplication exactly "meets multiplication and addition half-way", because you add the angles and multiply lengths.
>What's the significance of square and square root? Aren't they just some exponent values (2, 1/2) which have no particular significance on the real line? Why should imaginary numbers have a special place if they are tied to square roots (exponent of 0.5)?
This, my friend, is known as the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, and boy was it not easy to figure out. There was about a handful of failed attempts to prove it (i.e. proofs that people universally agreed were correct, but later realized they weren't).
In short: there is no significance, on the surface at least. You could have picked a root of any polynomial equation that has no real solution as your "imaginary unit", and got the same set of complex numbers in the end - and nothing more.
But you'll end up with sqrt(-something) anyway.
This comes from the following (non-obvious) fact. Any real polynomial in x can be written as a product of the form c(x - r_1)(x - r_2) ... (x - r_n), where c is a real number and r_i are the roots. For the coefficients to end up being real numbers, the roots must come in conjugate pairs (if (a + bi) is a root, so is (a - bi)), so when you multiply (x - (a - bi))(x - (a + bi)) out, you get a quadratic with real coefficients: x² - 2ax + a² + b²
So you can decompose any real polynomial into a product of real polynomials of degree 2 (you might have one term (x - [real root]) left over if the degree is odd - which is another reason why odd-degree polynomials always have a real root).
If you extend your real number field[4] by adjoining a real number, you get nothing new.
And if you get something new, you have adjoined a root of a quadratic equation.
Why sqrt(-1) instead of the root of x^2 + 5 = 0? There is convenience.
(1, sqrt(-1)) is convenient pair to define the complex plane because they form an orthonormal basis [3], i.e. a neat coordinate grid, with easy multiplication rule.
Nobody is forcing you to use i=sqrt(-1). You can define j as a non-real root of x^3 - 7 = 0. Throwing it into the bucket will get you the same "complex" numbers.
But now they'll be really annoying to work with. E.g.: if j = sqrt(-3), then
(a + bj)(c + dj) = (ac - 3bd) + (ad + bc)j
This extra 3 is annoying. In the end, you can still write your j in the form a + b * sqrt(-1), which is a nicer form, and you no longer have "extra" constants popping up in your formulas.
Complex numbers would be a much easier concept to understand if they didn't call it "complex" numbers or use the term "imaginary" numbers. Both of those make it much harder to digest because now you think that it's not real. What they really are are 2 dimensional numbers, meaning they have 2 components to each number.
The same goes for the term "real" numbers. Sometimes math, and its descendants like physics and computer science, can be too cutesy with their names that make it hard for regular people to understand or accept.
I've been teaching math for 35 years, which I admit, doesn't say much, but I assure you the difficulties students have with complex numbers by and large have nothing to do with the name. It's the same with everything else: lack of preparation in arithmetic and basic algebra.
But, might be more complete to say that complex numbers are two-dimensional numbers used to model a lot of different things. So simply saying they are two dimensional numbers only part of the explanation. To fully understand them, you need to consider the notion of a 2-d number fits the application area, and what it means in context.
For example, complex numbers can provide an elegant way to represent rotations, oscillations, waves, etc. making certain calculations much easier.
But complex numbers are also used to extend the real number system in a way that ensures every non-constant polynomial has a root. In that context, they aren't merely a convenient tool for representing two-dimensional phenomena; they help complete the number system itself in a mathematically precise sense.
And then there is quantum mechanics, where complex numbers play a fundamental role in the mathematical description of reality itself.
Gauss agrees with you. He said "If the numbers we call +1, -1, and √-1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative, and imaginary (or impossible) units, such an obscurity would have been out of the question."
Hear, hear. "Complex" makes it sound difficult, when the original idea was that they were a complex--as in compound--of two numbers. Complex analysis turns out to be almost trivial, thus taking an orthogonal journey, compared to the gnarliness of real analysis.
There is proof of this theorem in it that blew my mind some years ago [1]. Someday I want to finish reading the rest of the book.
> Starting with a given convex quadrilateral, construct a square, external to the quadrilateral, on each side. Van Aubel's theorem states that the two line segments between the centers of opposite squares are of equal lengths and are at right angles to one another.
I do have a soft spot for visual complex number explainers, good work. When I was 13 I credit [1] for blowing my mind about complex numbers and setting me onto my current career path
Wow. Thank you for sharing this relatively ancient online treasure.
Aside: as a commentary on how AI-brainrotted I've let myself become, I am awestruck by the animations and writing on that page predating the LLM coding era by that much. Already, the idea of someone acquiring the theoretical knowledge and practical software skills and time management and executive-function skills to create that page feels like it will only get more rare as more of us work at ever higher levels of abstraction.
Fun fact: Python natively supports complex numbers
In [1]: 2+3j
Out[1]: (2+3j)
In [2]: x=2+3j
In [3]: y=1-5j
In [4]: x+y
Out[4]: (3-2j)
In [5]: x*7
Out[5]: (14+21j)
In [6]: x*y
Out[6]: (17-7j)
In [7]: x**2
Out[7]: (-5+12j)
I've used them before for 2D graphics as a "hack".
It's so obscene that we're all getting screwed over by """experts""".
Mathematicians are getting replaced by AI for a good reason. They've jerked us with the flawed mathematics around for decades because they are all hiding so many skeletons in their closet.
One such skeleton is complex numbers. Complex numbers are only necessary because all other number systems that they made us use, like real numbers, in fact lack directionality. The entire foundation of mathematics is all messed up. And they sit there and LOL at the entire world.
There are like one or two people in the field who tried to do something about with type theories, but even that is dubious because they are not motivated - who needs mathematicians if they create theories that everyone can understand?
The explanation is a bit confusing, since it basically reduces to "some equations don't have solutions, so we have to invent them", which, if you already accept, you don't need complicated equations, just x^2=-1.
One thing which would have worked better (which is briefly mentioned) is Cardano's casus irreducibilis, but that would have needed more work.
Really? Of approximately one billion good, visual introductions to complex numbers, we're going to pick an article that appears to be substantially written by an LLM?
It doesn't just appear to be substantially written by an LLM; it was written by an LLM.
It lacks the punch. Anyone who didn't know the geometric definition would just be bored to hell by going over the history of how they were discovered which has nothing to do with geometry.
The article says "Visual Intro", but the introduction is literally not visual. The complex numbers are introduced through historical/algebraic lens, and then reintroduced visually, by which time the audience has been lost.
I find the historical approach is not the best way to learn about complex numbers.
Deciding square root of -1 is fine and use it in calculations as if it existed is confusing. Why does it work with sqrt(-1), and not with dividing by 0 ?
introducing the imaginary plane as: "hey someone found you could just draw them, and it works even better!" is even worse.
To teach complex numbers, you should start by defining them:
1 is here, i is here, multiplication for 1 is like in R, but multiplicating i by itself goes to -1, and then derive the calculation rules then.
And only when you went all the way to exp(i*theta) = cos(theta) + i sin(theta)
Only then you should explain what they are for. That they are a way to treat real numbers as a projection of these things that behave nicer in calculations. Deriving trig functions from that simple formula is trivial.
> Why does it work with sqrt(-1), and not with dividing by 0
This is pretty straightforward to explain.
With dividing by zero, any number you multiply by zero becomes zero. There's no other way to get zero through multiplication. So, the only sensible thing to divide by zero is zero (since "What times zero equals six?" doesn't have an answer).
But because anything multiplied by zero is zero, even if you divide zero by zero you have an undefined answer. Zero divided by zero could be anything! So that's also not meaningful.
The square root of negative one, however, only has to be defined once to get meaning out of all negative square roots.
It might help to point out to students that not all things called “number” in math are for counting/measuring.
Even before complex numbers, I was confused by negative numbers. Why negative times negative suddenly positive?
I spent time figuring that out. When complex numbers came I was ready. I knew they were not really numbers that would count something. And that they are just called numbers.
I think the best introduction is by taking the geometric perspective:
Addition is translation, multiplication with a positive number is scaling, multiplication with -1 is reflecting across the origin, multiplication with any negative number is scaling and reflecting at once. multiplying with a square root of a positive number does only part(half) of the scaling. multiplying twice with the square root does the full scaling.
Now the only question left is: what is the half of a reflection? a 90 degree rotation into a new dimension. Doing it twice returns to the original dimension but on the opposite side of the origin.
This also explains why division of 0 is a problem:
multiplying by 0 scales everything to the origin (ie deletes the original size). Division would need to restore the original size. But as a sibling comment has already said. Division by zero could just scale everything to infinity. But then everything can only flip between 0 and infinity.
When I first learnt complex numbers in school, I couldn't understand their purpose or why they are called imaginary etc.
I checked where they are used and found examples of current, magnetism etc. But I couldn't understand, electricity is a measurable physical quantity, how can you use imaginary numbers there??
Then I searched internet and found a Stack Exchange answer telling the story and how, instead of, complex (sounds like difficult) or imaginary (sounds like not useful practically), if we had better terms for them, then it would have been easier for beginners to understand them more intuitively.
It's completely true in my case.
After learning usage of vectors, thanks to Godot, for rotation and movement, and then about matrix etc. I now feel like "complex" numbers etc. are the representation of data through multiple numbers where a single value (scalars) is not enough. I may not be right in strict mathematics terms, but at least that's how I was able to understand them.
I think it would have been clearer if they weren't called "numbers".
For example, look at matrices [1]: no one asks themselves whether they are "real" or not. We know that we have defined operations on arrays of numbers which are useful to some degree.
If complex numbers were just called "complexes", a lot of confusion would just wither away.
Also, interestingly, quaternions and octonions aren't called "numbers".
[1] Complex numbers may, of course, be seen as special kinds of matrices, but this is beside my point here.
Oh, but they can be considered numbers.
I guess what counts as a number is arguable. But -1 is a number, and yet it has two parts: the natural number, and the sign. Sqrt(2) is a number, and yet it cannot be written down exactly. It requires an algebraic representation.
Generally, I think we use the word "number" for mathematical objects that have some notions we associate with the natural number (which are what we most intuitively understand as numbers), like ordering, summation, a notion of zero, etc. Complex numbers do not have all of these, but they have enough that we consider them numbers.
Another way to think of this: most of these non-natural numbers arose as a way of being able to represent results of basic operations on natural numbers, that are not themselves natural numbers. These results could sometimes be operated on further to yield a natural number again. But if we did not invent new numbers for these, these result were not easily expressible, and led to gaps in our math frameworks. In fact, a lot of math progress was hampered by not recognizing these numbers, and progress followed once they were recognized. And the reason we call them numbers is that they arise from basic algebraic operations on natural numbers.
They’re definitely numbers though -in many ways they’re nicer numbers than the Reals.
Complexes are overloaded as is - cellular, simplicial, chain etc.
We should call them "diternions".
I particularly like this book by Steven Pemberton. https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/Numbers.pdf
Imaginary numbers never made sense to me in high school. But this book gradually builds it up in a way that made the conclusion positively intuïtive. Highly recommended!
To me their purpose only came clearly recently. They're just a way to rotate smoothly one dimension into another. And control the speed of the rotation.
x into y. Potential energy to kinetic energy. Charge into current.
Keeping this definition but going higher in the dimensions: x into y, y into z and z into x. Going meta, the x into y rotation defines a plane; And a plane going into another direction is a volume. (x into y) into z.
What made it click, what made it beautiful is Geometric Algebra:
https://youtu.be/60z_hpEAtD8?is=e3GxYU4J1SdpsumW
> came clearly recently. They're just...
I assure you this is not the last enlightening moment that you are going have about what the complex numbers are.
> Geometric Algebra
Ah... Haven's heard about that one in quite some time...
I've come to understand it as something with both a magnitude and a phase. When you have a unity sine wave, it has two points per period where the magnitude is zero but those points have different phases.
I had a calculus prof who described it thus:
Calculus is a mathematical model of the world, and it is wrong in the sense of the famous quote about "all models [being] wrong, but some are useful", so mathematicians used the imaginary unit almost like a hotfix for their model.
Whether that's an accurate/rigorous statement or not, it helped me as a learner.
You can, of course, express things like oscillation without i, using vectors and matrices. But the ability to use Euler's formula to express complicated sinusoids as compact exponentials with base e simply makes the analysis much easier. In the words of my prof, it's merely a mathematical structure to express things more easily that "regular calculus" isn't good at expressing.
To me, that made the apparent paradoxes of expressing e.g. phase angles and reactive power and stuff using i a lot easier to stomach.
You can use exponential with matrices as well.
That some people don’t want to understand deeply the tools they use don’t make their tools superficial or “hotfixes”
I mean the guy has a PhD in mathematics so I'm sure he understands his tools deeply. Certainly more deeply than I did when I was an undergraduate in his class. Sometimes the right analogy, even if imperfect, is more helpful to build intuition than pages of rigorous proofs. Chill out.
Of course maths need intuition, it isn’t always incompatible with being rigorous
But yes some who have PhD in physics don’t always care about understanding deeply maths tools. Depends what you’re doing
I’m not sure why you feel the need to keep arguing about this. I’m not going to go back to my Alma Mater and tell the prof that some nobody on hacker news doesn’t like an analogy he used 12 years ago.
Whatever point you’re trying to make is not working.
Go away.
Im sorry if I come across as aggressive, Im myself chill and just here to talk, share and discover new things. Analogies are essential to learning I agree with you
I really was surprised on this when learning about these in Welch labs [1] and 3b1b.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T647CGsuOVU&list=PLiaHhY2iBX...
> I now feel like "complex" numbers etc. are the representation of data through multiple numbers where a single value (scalars) is not enough.
Ok, now find a single term that you think would adequately describe that concept.
A vector!
'Imaginary' is a misnomer, they should actually be called Orthogonal Numbers instead since they lie on orthogonal axes.
So much of mathematics is just this.
The good old "if only they named it differently it would be easy".
It's just not true. Mathematics is far deeper and richer than pretty much any other field. The naming of things is not stopping you from understanding it, but the sheer magnitude of it. Yes, as an adult it's easy to give a new look at the things you were flooded with in college and understand a tiny fraction of it with time and no pressure, and conclude it was easy all along "if only it was done like ..."
Go ahead and keep trying to learn for weeks with fast pace and kind of crappy material, and you'll remember why it actually was difficult.
Agreed, the naming system is atrocious. The one that really pisses me off at this point is that "real" numbers get to be called that. Imaginary numbers with rational coefficients are SIGNIFICANTLY more "real" than a converging infinite series, imo
Wait ... you think of the Reals as converging infinite series?
I think of them as pairs (L,R) of sets of rationals, with every in L less than or equal to every thing in R ...
That is a surreal view of them. ;^)
This article misses one of the most useful and deep representations for complex numbers: polar coordinates. There’s some bits in there about adding angles and such when multiplying, but it turns out these are “obvious” in polar notation.
A complex number can be expressed in Cartesian coordinates as (x,y) or x+yi. It can be expressed as polar coordinates as (r,theta). What’s the corresponding complex notation? Surprisingly, it’s r*e^(i theta), where the angle is taken in radians. It might seem really weird to see an exponential there, but it turns out that the exponential behaves like a trig function when given an imaginary exponent - to be precise, e^(i theta) = cos theta + i sin theta.
Now multiplication becomes easy: multiplying two polar-notation complex numbers (r1,t1) x (r2,t2) gives r1r2 e^(i (t1+t2)) following the usual rules of exponential arithmetic, i.e. (r1r1, t1+t2).
The complex exponential looks like a very strange notation at first because we’re all used to grade school exponents, but you can think of it as a function that takes an angle and produces a point on the unit circle. Feed it a continuous input, and it traces out an arc or a circle. sin and cos are merely the one-dimensional projections of this function.
Frequency becomes simply e^(i ft) where f is the frequency in radians and t is time - representing a point racing around a circle at a set speed. Multiplying two signals with different (complex) frequencies produces a new signal with the sum of their frequencies. With this notation, complex signals are the simple ones to understand - real signals are the “more complex” ones, as every real signal consists of a complex signal added to its conjugate.
The "visual intro" misses a lot, and wastes half the space by introducing the complex numbers algebraically without a single visual because it's LLM slop.
A "visual intro" that doesn't even mention Mobius transformations[1] or Riemann surfaces [2] or any of the beautiful, colorful ways to visualize complex functions [3], or..
..well, it's just lazy LLM slop.
Is it better than the average high school introduction to the subject?
Sadly, yes. But it's such a low bar.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z1fIsUNhO4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax5wbKsPBqA
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtoIXhUgqSk
You’ve asserted several times in this thread that this is “LLM slop”. Having read a decent amount of math content on the internet, I’m not sure I quite agree, so I’d like to hear why you think it’s LLM slop?
For one, this article has (charmingly?) terrible math rendering, rather reminiscent of someone copy-pasting random pictures of equations from the Internet and supplementing them with Word’s Equation Editor or something. An LLM would have just dumped a pile of LaTeX and called it a day. For another, I don’t sense any of the usual writing tics that are suggestive of LLM writing. I don’t claim either of those are remotely definitive, but my personal feeling is that this was largely hand-written and aimed at a very introductory level (i.e. not the sort of level that will benefit from knowing about Riemann surfaces).
>Having read a decent amount of math content on the internet
I have written a decent amount of math content. On the internet, and off the internet.
See: https://romankogan.net/math
Do you want to get into a sentence-by-sentence analysis?
> I’m not sure I quite agree, so I’d like to hear why you think it’s LLM slop?
I have pointed out one reason: because the text titled "visual introduction" lacks visuals, and the introduction of complex number in it is purely algebraic without a single picture.
The numbers are introduced algebraically, and then explained visually, after the reader was already confused. You only get anything out of this if you already know complex numbers well enough; in which case it's not an introduction anyway.
The author says, quote "I did use AI assistance for some of the components", so I hope this settles the discussion as to whether it's AI slop or not.
It's not AI slop -- I wrote it and it took quite a long time to write. I did use AI assistance for some of the components and indeed you are right: I did copy paste images (that I mostly generated myself) to try to introduce the concepts in a better way although some people will always have criticisms of almost anything so I take a lot of stuff posted on forums with a grain of salt. It's good to remember behind the wires it is us humans (for the most part) trying to communicate after all and trying to help others. Hopefully the write-up did help some people get the concepts -- I tried to write it in a form that I thought would have helped me more had I had the chance of being reintroduced to imaginary numbers -- a lot of the concepts I included in the write-up were not taught to me when I initially encountered them and I wish they had been.
> I did use AI assistance for some of the components
...and it shows.
All I can say is that it made the article substantially worse.
Sure, thanks for the feedback either way - I'll keep it in mind for my next write-up.
For an interactive approach I built this some time ago. [1]
It allows putting complex numbers on the complex plane and doing addition, multiplication and exponentiation via drag and drop. It provides some intuition for addition==translation and multiplication==scale-rotation.
[1]: https://static.laszlokorte.de/complex-plane/
But when you represent a complex number as a+bi, what's the meaning of '+' there? In Argand diagram, the numbers are coordinates. Why do you sum up coordinates?
More fundamentally what's addition and multiplication? Is there a continuity between them, like an operator that represents both addition and multiplication meeting them half-way?
What's the significance of square and square root? Aren't they just some exponent values (2, 1/2) which have no particular significance on the real line? Why should imaginary numbers have a special place if they are tied to square roots (exponent of 0.5)?
> Why do you sum up coordinates?
People use sums to denote vector components, too. It's common to see ai + bj + ck (pretend there are hats on i, j, and k) to mean the vector [a b c].
So with complex numbers, you can think of it as a vector aj + bi where j and i are basis vectors, but we call j "1", because complex numbers have a notion of multiplication, and in that notion, j acts like 1, in that zj = jz = z for any complex number z.
Nothing bad happens if you write all complex numbers a + bi as vectors or tuples [a b]. It's just less convenient.
We denote a 2D point as (3,2) not (3+2). Why?
3 + 2 is just 5. But people will sometimes write 3i + 2j for the point or vector (3, 2), where i is the vector (1, 0) and j is the vector (0, 1).
In your example 3 and 2 belong to different dimensions. you could write "3x + 2y" to express 3 steps along the x axis and 2 along the y axis. Just writing "3+2" would lead to the expectation that 5 could be calculated as reasonable result, which would not be the case.
You can absolutely deal with complex numbers with the (x,y) notation
>what's the meaning of '+' there?
Mathematicians often reuse the same notation for different things where it's clear (for the mathematicians) what the implied meaning is. That means however that non-mathematicians can get confused.
The plus here is the operation that we call "the sum of complex numbers", where the numbers are a and bi. We can work towards this by first defining complex numbers as a tuple of two real numbers with particular sum and multiplication laws for these tuples. So (a, b) + (c, d) = (a + b, c + d) where the left side plus is for complex numbers and the right side plus is for real numbers. Similarly for multiplication, (a, b) * (c, d) = (ac - bd, bc + ad).
We associate (1,0) with the real number 1, and similarly for tuples of the form (a,0). The association is what allows us to see the real numbers as a subset of the complex numbers rather than being some unrelated set. It makes sense because the set of tuples of the form (a,0) with the multiplication laws of complex numbers behaves the same way as the real numbers and is in 1:1 correspondence with them. This association is used every time we write (a,0) as a(1,0) or just "a". We also write (0,b) as b(0,1) since (b,0)*(0,1) = (0,b), from the multiplication law. A general tuple (a, b) then can be written as (a,0) + (0,b) or, as what we've said is the same thing, a + b(0,1). Now we have simplified notation for all of these things except (0,1). It follows from the multiplication law that (0,1)*(0,1) = -(1,0) = -1. The complex number whose square is -1 is denoted as i. All these simplifications allow you to write (a,b) as a + bi.
> More fundamentally what's addition and multiplication? Is there a continuity between them, like an operator that represents both addition and multiplication meeting them half-way?
I'm not personally aware of any concept of continuity between these operations. In abstract algebra, operations are fundamental to an algebraic structure. The field of real numbers or the field of complex numbers are algebraic structures defined by their elements, the binary operation called addition, the binary operation called multiplication, and the laws that these operations satisfy. For example, both are commutative and associative, but the distribution law shows that they're different: a*(b+c) = a*b + a*c, but not a+b*c = (a+b)*(a+c). Also, a+0 = a, but a*1 = a, so the operations have different special elements that "fix" the other element when an operation is applied. It may be interesting to think what a "half-way operator" would have to be like with respect to these laws.
>What's the significance of square and square root? Aren't they just some exponent values (2, 1/2) which have no particular significance on the real line?
The idea of complex numbers and the more general idea of field extensions, which describes the process of obtaining complex numbers from reals, came from the study of polynomials. Polynomials can only have terms of integer degree. They satisfy many nice properties and quite rich mathematical structures arise from them which would not be possible with general non-integer degrees. Second degree polynomials with real coefficients, like x^2 + 1, are the lowest-degree polynomials such that they may not have real roots, and x^2 + 1 is the simplest example, but any other polynomial can be used to produce the complex numbers as well, if has a factor like x^2 + a. This is where the 2 comes from. It's not significant from a real line perspective (2 is just a number among the infinite reals) but it's significant from an algebraic one.
My, what excellent questions! Thank you for asking. Let's get to it!
>But when you represent a complex number as a+bi, what's the meaning of '+' there?
Here, treat a as the notation for "move a steps to the right", and bi as "move b steps up". Think about it like moving a pawn on a chess board.
These operations are translations: taking something and moving it. You can execute them as instructions.
"+" means composition of these two operations; that is doing them one after another.
In which order? Doesn't matter, the result will be the same.
Since we talk about "+", let's talk about "-".
The operations we are invertible, you can undo each of them (or any combination).
If "3" stands for the command "Move a pawn 3 steps right", you can introduce a notation "-3" meaning "move it back" (i.e., move it 3 steps left).
You have then: a + -a = 0, and to save yourself some ink, you just write a - b instead of a + (-b).
Same with bi; -bi means move b steps down.
>In Argand diagram, the numbers are coordinates. Why do you sum up coordinates?
Say, you move a pawn 3 steps right and 2 cells up.
Then you move it again by 1 cell right and 4 cells up.
That's the same as moving it (3 + 1) = 4 cells right and (2 + 4) = 6 cells up.
In our previous notation: (3 + 2i) + (1 + 4i) = (3 + 1) + (2 + 4)i = 4 + 6i.
If you know linear algebra: it works this way because the operations 1 (moving one step right) and i (moving one step right) form a basis[1] for the vector space of translations in a plane.
In simpler terms, it works this way because you can combine the move operations in any order (we can understand that easily), and so we can:
1. Write each move operation as "move ___ left/right and __ up/down"
2. Add up left/right and up/down components separately
>More fundamentally what's addition and multiplication?
We are treating numbers here as translation operators, i.e. commands: "move by this much".
Addition is composition, i.e. doing commands in order (which, turns out, doesn't matter).
Multiplication - well, that's where the salt of the article is. Or rather, should have been.
First, let's look at multiplication of "real" numbers.
Geometrically, the operation is proportional scaling. You can think of it as redefining the unit.
Say, we agreed that "3" means "make 3 steps to the right". But for that to make sense, we need to know what a step is.
We can define, by decree, that a step on a chess board is one cell (1). So "3" by itself really means "3 * 1" (3 of 1 step to the right).
We can scale a number by changing the step size; defined geometrically by proportion:
(a * b) is a distance such that (a * b) : b = a : 1.
This might seem weird, but that's how Euclid would've done it, because it allows us to think of a and b as quantities of equal kind (geometric lengths), avoiding distinguishing geometric quantities, like lengths and translation operators (aka vectors), and scalars, i.e. quantities you can scale by.
Side note: vector literally means "carriers", because the vector operation (translation) moves something from one place to another. A mosquito is a malaria vector.
scaling (multiplication) and adding (composition) interact in a familiar way:
c(a + b) = ca + cb
This is fine and dandy as long as we have only one dimension to deal with.
When we have two, we can first restrict ourselves to multiplying by "real" numbers, because we can say that multiplying by a is simply making everything a times bigger or smaller, and it doesn't break anything.
You still get the same interplay of addition and multiplication.
If we want to keep all the other niceties that we had from real numbers, we will be forced to have the following meaning of multiplication of couples of them (i.e. 2D vectors, translations in a plane):
To get a product of two 2D vectors, u and v, you ADD the angles that u and v make with the x-axis, and you MULTIPLY their lengths.
If you denote this operation as u * v, then you have all the rules for * and + that worked for real numbers still working.
It turns out, essentially, that there's no other way to cook up a product of 2D vectors that has these properties.
And that for 3D vectors, there is no such way at all, a consequence of the Hairy Ball Theorem[5].
And that for 4D vectors, you can define a product rule of that sort only if you give up on the order not mattering. For real and complex numbers, a * b = b * a, but in 4D, the order matters.
And for other dimensions, you really don't get anything nice.
Dimensions 1, 2, and 4 are special; but 2 more so than others.
> Is there a continuity between them, like an operator that represents both addition and multiplication meeting them half-way?
There is a continuity between addition and multiplication.
You can define multiplication of integers by treating one as "number of times to do a thing" and the other as "distance to translate by":
3 * 5 = (move by 3 steps to the right 5 times)
You get rational numbers from this, and real numbers by completion.So real number multiplication flows from real number addition by continuity.
Another connection is that multiplication of powers is addition of exponents:
a^n * a^m = a^(n + m).
a^n = a * a * a ... * a (n times)
This is how you can define exponentiation. There are other ways. But that's to say that addition and multiplication are inherently inseparable when it comes to real numbers because an integer can be thought of as either a length or a count (that's to say, in 1D vector are scalars), and keeping that puts a lot of structure on what you do.
I think the true spirit of your question deserves this answer though:
Complex multiplication exactly "meets multiplication and addition half-way", because you add the angles and multiply lengths.
>What's the significance of square and square root? Aren't they just some exponent values (2, 1/2) which have no particular significance on the real line? Why should imaginary numbers have a special place if they are tied to square roots (exponent of 0.5)?
This, my friend, is known as the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, and boy was it not easy to figure out. There was about a handful of failed attempts to prove it (i.e. proofs that people universally agreed were correct, but later realized they weren't).
In short: there is no significance, on the surface at least. You could have picked a root of any polynomial equation that has no real solution as your "imaginary unit", and got the same set of complex numbers in the end - and nothing more.
But you'll end up with sqrt(-something) anyway.
This comes from the following (non-obvious) fact. Any real polynomial in x can be written as a product of the form c(x - r_1)(x - r_2) ... (x - r_n), where c is a real number and r_i are the roots. For the coefficients to end up being real numbers, the roots must come in conjugate pairs (if (a + bi) is a root, so is (a - bi)), so when you multiply (x - (a - bi))(x - (a + bi)) out, you get a quadratic with real coefficients: x² - 2ax + a² + b²
So you can decompose any real polynomial into a product of real polynomials of degree 2 (you might have one term (x - [real root]) left over if the degree is odd - which is another reason why odd-degree polynomials always have a real root).
If you extend your real number field[4] by adjoining a real number, you get nothing new.
And if you get something new, you have adjoined a root of a quadratic equation.
Why sqrt(-1) instead of the root of x^2 + 5 = 0? There is convenience.
(1, sqrt(-1)) is convenient pair to define the complex plane because they form an orthonormal basis [3], i.e. a neat coordinate grid, with easy multiplication rule.
Nobody is forcing you to use i=sqrt(-1). You can define j as a non-real root of x^3 - 7 = 0. Throwing it into the bucket will get you the same "complex" numbers.
But now they'll be really annoying to work with. E.g.: if j = sqrt(-3), then
(a + bj)(c + dj) = (ac - 3bd) + (ad + bc)j
This extra 3 is annoying. In the end, you can still write your j in the form a + b * sqrt(-1), which is a nicer form, and you no longer have "extra" constants popping up in your formulas.
So you do that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basis_(linear_algebra)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_algebra
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthonormal_basis
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_extension
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion
Complex numbers would be a much easier concept to understand if they didn't call it "complex" numbers or use the term "imaginary" numbers. Both of those make it much harder to digest because now you think that it's not real. What they really are are 2 dimensional numbers, meaning they have 2 components to each number.
The same goes for the term "real" numbers. Sometimes math, and its descendants like physics and computer science, can be too cutesy with their names that make it hard for regular people to understand or accept.
I've been teaching math for 35 years, which I admit, doesn't say much, but I assure you the difficulties students have with complex numbers by and large have nothing to do with the name. It's the same with everything else: lack of preparation in arithmetic and basic algebra.
Well calling complex numbers "rotational" would at least give a clue to what they do.
You can do them purely geometrically, so lack of preparation in arithmetic and algebra isn't a pre-requisite.
You are very right.
But, might be more complete to say that complex numbers are two-dimensional numbers used to model a lot of different things. So simply saying they are two dimensional numbers only part of the explanation. To fully understand them, you need to consider the notion of a 2-d number fits the application area, and what it means in context.
For example, complex numbers can provide an elegant way to represent rotations, oscillations, waves, etc. making certain calculations much easier.
But complex numbers are also used to extend the real number system in a way that ensures every non-constant polynomial has a root. In that context, they aren't merely a convenient tool for representing two-dimensional phenomena; they help complete the number system itself in a mathematically precise sense.
And then there is quantum mechanics, where complex numbers play a fundamental role in the mathematical description of reality itself.
Gauss agrees with you. He said "If the numbers we call +1, -1, and √-1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative, and imaginary (or impossible) units, such an obscurity would have been out of the question."
Hear, hear. "Complex" makes it sound difficult, when the original idea was that they were a complex--as in compound--of two numbers. Complex analysis turns out to be almost trivial, thus taking an orthogonal journey, compared to the gnarliness of real analysis.
One of my friends had a Russian book translated to Spanish. The translation had a few mistskes, in particular they call them "complicated" numbers. :)
Such a funny translation:)
I recommend Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham
There is proof of this theorem in it that blew my mind some years ago [1]. Someday I want to finish reading the rest of the book.
> Starting with a given convex quadrilateral, construct a square, external to the quadrilateral, on each side. Van Aubel's theorem states that the two line segments between the centers of opposite squares are of equal lengths and are at right angles to one another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Aubel%27s_theorem
Wow, that's such a surprising theorem. Thanks for sharing.
I do have a soft spot for visual complex number explainers, good work. When I was 13 I credit [1] for blowing my mind about complex numbers and setting me onto my current career path
[1]: https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/
Wow. Thank you for sharing this relatively ancient online treasure.
Aside: as a commentary on how AI-brainrotted I've let myself become, I am awestruck by the animations and writing on that page predating the LLM coding era by that much. Already, the idea of someone acquiring the theoretical knowledge and practical software skills and time management and executive-function skills to create that page feels like it will only get more rare as more of us work at ever higher levels of abstraction.
Here is an excellent (and visual) series of videos on Complex Numbers by Welch Labs titled "Imaginary Numbers are Real" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46972870
Fun fact: Python natively supports complex numbers
I've used them before for 2D graphics as a "hack".I used complex numbers to solve popular interview question.
It can be used to convince students that they are useful.
https://pratik.deoghare.com/complex-mars-rover.html
It's so obscene that we're all getting screwed over by """experts""".
Mathematicians are getting replaced by AI for a good reason. They've jerked us with the flawed mathematics around for decades because they are all hiding so many skeletons in their closet.
One such skeleton is complex numbers. Complex numbers are only necessary because all other number systems that they made us use, like real numbers, in fact lack directionality. The entire foundation of mathematics is all messed up. And they sit there and LOL at the entire world.
There are like one or two people in the field who tried to do something about with type theories, but even that is dubious because they are not motivated - who needs mathematicians if they create theories that everyone can understand?
The explanation is easy and fun.
tangent: I am really enjoying the new ui elements in chatpgt.
Explain X to me prompt now gives me pictures, quizes . so good.
Not a tangent really. This explanation was very clearly LLM-produced.
For starters, this "visual intro" introduces complex numbers algebraically.
The text has a visual explanation, but the intro had zero pictures.
The explanation is a bit confusing, since it basically reduces to "some equations don't have solutions, so we have to invent them", which, if you already accept, you don't need complicated equations, just x^2=-1.
One thing which would have worked better (which is briefly mentioned) is Cardano's casus irreducibilis, but that would have needed more work.
Really? Of approximately one billion good, visual introductions to complex numbers, we're going to pick an article that appears to be substantially written by an LLM?
My feelings exactly.
It doesn't just appear to be substantially written by an LLM; it was written by an LLM.
It lacks the punch. Anyone who didn't know the geometric definition would just be bored to hell by going over the history of how they were discovered which has nothing to do with geometry.
The article says "Visual Intro", but the introduction is literally not visual. The complex numbers are introduced through historical/algebraic lens, and then reintroduced visually, by which time the audience has been lost.
Of course this article will rise to the top here.
I wrote most of it -- I did use AI assistance for 20% of it though (I am not an LLM).
>I did use AI assistance for 20% of it though
I would love to see the AI-unassisted version.
AI assistance is like adding vomit flavor to whatever you're cooking. You don't need much before it starts reeking.
[flagged]
I find the historical approach is not the best way to learn about complex numbers.
Deciding square root of -1 is fine and use it in calculations as if it existed is confusing. Why does it work with sqrt(-1), and not with dividing by 0 ?
introducing the imaginary plane as: "hey someone found you could just draw them, and it works even better!" is even worse.
To teach complex numbers, you should start by defining them:
1 is here, i is here, multiplication for 1 is like in R, but multiplicating i by itself goes to -1, and then derive the calculation rules then.
And only when you went all the way to exp(i*theta) = cos(theta) + i sin(theta)
Only then you should explain what they are for. That they are a way to treat real numbers as a projection of these things that behave nicer in calculations. Deriving trig functions from that simple formula is trivial.
> Why does it work with sqrt(-1), and not with dividing by 0
This is pretty straightforward to explain.
With dividing by zero, any number you multiply by zero becomes zero. There's no other way to get zero through multiplication. So, the only sensible thing to divide by zero is zero (since "What times zero equals six?" doesn't have an answer).
But because anything multiplied by zero is zero, even if you divide zero by zero you have an undefined answer. Zero divided by zero could be anything! So that's also not meaningful.
The square root of negative one, however, only has to be defined once to get meaning out of all negative square roots.
well see the sibling comment... Apparently extending the complex plane with a number that represent 1/0 is a thing...
It might help to point out to students that not all things called “number” in math are for counting/measuring.
Even before complex numbers, I was confused by negative numbers. Why negative times negative suddenly positive?
I spent time figuring that out. When complex numbers came I was ready. I knew they were not really numbers that would count something. And that they are just called numbers.
>Why does it work with sqrt(-1), and not with dividing by 0 ?
Good question!
It does work with dividing by zero :D
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere
I think the best introduction is by taking the geometric perspective: Addition is translation, multiplication with a positive number is scaling, multiplication with -1 is reflecting across the origin, multiplication with any negative number is scaling and reflecting at once. multiplying with a square root of a positive number does only part(half) of the scaling. multiplying twice with the square root does the full scaling.
Now the only question left is: what is the half of a reflection? a 90 degree rotation into a new dimension. Doing it twice returns to the original dimension but on the opposite side of the origin.
This also explains why division of 0 is a problem: multiplying by 0 scales everything to the origin (ie deletes the original size). Division would need to restore the original size. But as a sibling comment has already said. Division by zero could just scale everything to infinity. But then everything can only flip between 0 and infinity.
yeah I think that's right.
taking the geometric aspect first and defining operations on points in the plane, showing that it works to match multiplication and rotation.