This is a straw man and does a huge disservice to the complicated history behind complex numbers. [1] In particular, mathematicians came up with it first (the I

This is a straw man and does a huge disservice to the complicated history behind complex numbers. [1] In particular, mathematicians came up with it first (the Italians, Cardano et al., if you don't count the greeks who did something fuzzily approaching complex numbers), but it doesn't matter anyway because back then there were no clear lines between the sciences. Mathematicians were physicists, engineers, philosophers, astronomers, and whatever else. The "refuse to acknowledge the existence" line is also nonsense (ignoring for the moment that "existence" is not a useful term for an abstraction), because Euler made "i" widespread by including it in his famous textbook, the complex plane was invented as early as the 1600s, Gauss used it for some of his most impressive discoveries (and he lived at the same time as Fourier, who, let's be real, was also a mathematician), and their reservations were more along the lines of "guarding against its misuse, "which still occurs today in algebra classes all around the world, and having doubts about its "metaphysics." But I understand the desire to glorify engineers. It does often happen that practical concerns drive great mathematical discoveries. Just... be humble and do your research :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#History