
A Short History of Complex Numbers (2006) [pdf] - eklitzke
http://www.math.uri.edu/~merino/spring06/mth562/ShortHistoryComplexNumbers2006.pdf
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abecedarius
Quotes Gauss: had "positive, negative and imaginary (or worse still,
impossible) unity, been given the names say, of direct, inverse and lateral
unity, there would hardly have been any scope for such obscurity." I like
that! Lateral numbers, like "throwing a lateral" in American football. It's
too bad though that that only refers to addition; for multiplying you might
talk about stretchy and twisty numbers instead.

~~~
disconcision
don't think it only refers to addition? 'lateral' just lampshades the
orthogonality of the imaginary line to the real on the complex plane. the
stretchytwistyness of multiplication simply inhabits said laterality.

i mean you could argue that 'lateral' in-itself is insufficient to
disambiguate between the complex numbers and other planar algebras like the
duals or split-complexes or just plain-ol pairs with pairwise multiplication.
but it's clear who's the belle of the ball.

i guess if we want to be more inclusive we could call the pairwise-mults the
plain- (pun intended) or boring-laterals, and the three planar complex
algebras could collectively be called the stretchy-laterals, having sheary,
twisty, and lorentzy (hyperbolic-twisty) subtypes.

~~~
abecedarius
Yeah, I only meant that calling them laterals instead of imaginaries brings
out their vectorial nature, but complex numbers as just vectors are boring.

What _would_ we call complex numbers if we wanted a short, vivid, inviting
name? They ought to be something schoolkids are eager to learn. The name's
only a small part of the school "ugh field", but maybe it's a part we can do
something about?

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carapace
"An Imaginary Tale: The Story of √-1" by Paul J. Nahin is delightful. (If you
liked this and want more.)

[http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9259.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9259.html)

~~~
oaeth478et
Agreed! I always thought I hated history (or at least found it incredibly
boring) until I started reading math and science history. It's really cool!

------
spynxic
And the story continues --
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_algebra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_algebra)

~~~
akkartik
[http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/chaos-makes-the-
multive...](http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/chaos-makes-the-multiverse-
unnecessary)

