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You can always express some calculation that uses imaginary numbers in a way that avoids them. It might make things vastly more complex to so so, but it's possi
by nitwit005 4y ago
You can always express some calculation that uses imaginary numbers in a way that avoids them. It might make things vastly more complex to so so, but it's possible.
People used to do all sorts of math without negative numbers or zero.
- ndr 4y agoHow would you do sqrt(-1) in that case?
- nitwit005 4y agoThat's not something calculable. The symbol i is just a sort of placeholder for it.
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- XorNot 4y agoImaginary numbers don't answer that though: they assume it has an answer, and do operations anyway.
- audunw 4y agoOne of the ways to avoid imaginary numbers is to use matrices instead. You wouldn't exactly solve sqrt(-1). You'd solve the sqrt of the negative of the 2x2 identity matrix (-I) You can't solve sqrt(-1) without a second dimension. So even with imaginary numbers you kind of have an implicit -1+0i when solving sqrt(-1). Complex numbers is just a way of working with two numbers at once, just like 2 dimensional vectors and matrices. There nothing special to it, other than some syntactic shorthands.
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