Imaginary numbers as we have discussed in Tuesday’s post are numbers of the form where
is a real number and
. The term imaginary as (opposed to real) was first used by Rene Descartes, the mathematician who invented Coordinate Geometry – the Cartesian plane in particular. Leonhard Euler was the one who introduced the symbol
for
.
Gerolamo Cardano, a pioneer in probability, was the one who suggested the use of numbers of the form where
and
are real numbers and
. These were named complex numbers by Carl Frederich Gauss.The real part of
is
and the imaginary part is
.
Note that if we treat these numbers as binomials, then, to add and
will result to
. Similarly, multiplying
gives us
.
The following follow from the operations that we have done above: (1) and (2)
Prove this!











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[...] == "undefined"){ addthis_share = [];}This is the third post in the Complex Numbers Primer. In the previous post in this series, we have learned that complex numbers can be added and multiplied just like [...]