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"By making our numbers 'more complicated', the methods we use to work with those numbers may become more simple."

• ColinWright 9y ago
  By making our programming languages more complex, we make our programs easier. By pushing the common complexity into a shared location, problems become easier to solve. Complex numbers really do factor out a lot of the complexity from many problems, at comparatively little cost. When people say they don't "get" complex numbers, usually they mean they've seen them mentioned, but have never actually done anything with them. It's like staying that you've read a book on lisp and don't get it. Using these things is an essential part of coming to understand them.
  • techno_modus 9y ago
    > When people say they don't "get" complex numbers, usually they mean they've seen them mentioned, but have never actually done anything with them. What people complain about is that they do not have a (real or hypothetical) device which can display its measurements as a complex number while they do have devices which measure properties in terms of integer, rational and real numbers.
    • roywiggins 9y ago
      Real numbers almost certainly are just as fictional as complex numbers. Physics doesn't seem to admit infinitely precise measurements, so literally no theoretical device can operate with real numbers. Even if real numbers are "real", only a countable number of them are computable, even in theory. The rest are probably completely inaccessible, barring hypercomputation. (Interestingly, access to true real numbers gives you hypercomputation as a side-effect)
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]