Thinking the Unthinkable: The Story of Complex Numbers (with a Moral)
Keyword(s):
The usual definition of complex numbers, either as ordered pairs (a, b) of real numbers or as “numbers” of the form a + bi, does not give any indication of their long and tortuous evolution, which lasted about three hundred years. I want to describe this evolution very briefly because I think some lessons can be learned from this story, just as from many other such stories concerning the evolution of a concept, result, or theory. These lessons have to do with the impact of the history of mathematics on our understanding of mathematics and on our effectiveness in teaching it. But more about the moral of this story later.