3 ms·

How would you do sqrt(-1) in that case?

• nitwit005 4y ago
  That's not something calculable. The symbol i is just a sort of placeholder for it.
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• XorNot 4y ago
  Imaginary numbers don't answer that though: they assume it has an answer, and do operations anyway.
• audunw 4y ago
  One 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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