“But just what are imaginary numbers, you may now be asking yourself, and what on earth could it mean to raise e to an imaginary-number power? This chapter concerns mathematicians' long struggle to answer the first of these two questions.… — David Stipp Copy Share Image
“In my view, Euler's tranquil temperament, fairness, and generosity were integral to his greatness as a mathematician and scientist- he was never inclined to… — David Stipp Copy Share Image
“The association of multiplication with vector rotation was one of the geometric interpretation's most important elements because it decisively connected the imaginaries with rotary… — David Stipp Copy Share Image
“Now be honest-wouldn't you have expected e^i*pi to be (a) gibberish aling the lines of "elephant inkpie," or, if it were mathematically meaningful, to… — David Stipp Copy Share Image
“The imaginaries finally lost their air of impossibility when nineteenth-century mathematicians realized that they're actually perfectly ordinary, law-abiding numerical beings-it's just that they hail… — David Stipp Copy Share Image
“If you were given to thinking of numbers as having human-like qualities, you might picture e^i*pi as a guru into transcendental meditation who'd achieved… — David Stipp Copy Share Image
“The fact that trig functions cyclically output the same numbers as ever larger angles are plugged into them, by the way, explains why endlessly… — David Stipp Copy Share Image
“By the early 1600s mathematicians had managed to crank out an approximation of pi that was accurate to 35 digits, which is far more… — David Stipp Copy Share Image
“But just what are imaginary numbers, you may now be asking yourself, and what on earth could it mean to raise e to an… — David Stipp Copy Share Image
