If new kinds of numbers were like new consumer products, mathematicians would have every right to fire the marketing company that came up with the names “complex numbers” and “imaginary numbers”. I mean, what kind of sales pitch goes with that branding? “Psst: wanna buy a number? It’s really hard to understand, and best of all, it doesn’t even exist!”?
We mathematicians have nobody but ourselves to blame, since it was one of our own (René Descartes) who saddled numbers like sqrt(−1) with the term “imaginary” and another mathematician (Carl-Friedrich Gauss) who dubbed numbers like 2+sqrt(−1) “complex”. Now it’s several centuries too late for us to ask everybody to use different words. But since those centuries have given us a clearer understanding of what these new sorts of numbers are good for, I can’t help wishing that, instead of calling them “complex numbers”, we’d called them — well, I’ll come to that in a bit.
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