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that said . So I put it into the calculator and it worked, but I have no idea
why, because e to any power isnt supposed to be a negative number, and I thought
pi was in no way related to e.
If you could explain the process, it would save lots of time pondering and plugging e,
pi, and i into the calculator in random ways to figure out whats going on.
We'd be glad to explain; that's exactly what this area is here for.
The first question to ask, though, is not "why does ", but rather, "what
does even mean?" In other words, what does it mean to raise a number to an
imaginary power?
Once that question is answered, it will be much more clear why . It turns
out that for all x, a fact which is known as de Moivre's formula, and
So now, the question is, why is the "right" thing to define what e
Of course, the original definition doesn't even make sense for fractions and negative
numbers. You should have learned how to extend the definition to include fractions.
For example, since 1/3 is that number which, when multiplied by 3, gives you 1, it
makes sense to define to be that number which, if you raise it to the power of 3,
would give you (i.e., a); in other words, is defined to be the cube root of a.
But none of these considerations give any clue as to what raising a number to a
complex power should mean. Instead, we need to express exponentiation, or its
properties, in some way that can be extended to complex powers.
The first way to do this is to use the fact that happens to be equal to the infinite
sum
The reason why this is so depends on the theory of Taylor series from calculus,
which would take too long to describe here. You will encounter it in a calculus class
at some point, if you haven't already.
Now, this infinite sum makes perfectly good sense even for imaginary numbers. By
plugging in ix in place of x, you get
Now it turns out that is the infinite sum for cos x, while
series). Therefore, .
Now, this may be a little unsatisfying to you since I haven't explained why , cos x,
and sin x equal those three different infinite sums. I can't do so without assuming
some calculus background that you may not have.
some calculus, but I can describe the calculus involved more easily.
Associated to many functions f(x) is another function f'(x), called the derivative of
f(x). It measures how rapidly f(x) is changing at the value x.
rate of change of such a population (the number of births per day, for example) is
directly proportional to the current size of the population; that is, f'(x) is a constant
times f(x). When , that constant is exactly 1 (that's the property which
If you think about it for a minute, these equations are very reasonable. First of all,
when x=0, sin x equals zero but increases as x increases; in fact, the slope of the
graph of y = sin x at the point (0,0) is 1, which is another way of saying that the rate
of increase there is 1, so f'(0) = 1.
But then, as x increases to , the rate of increase drops off and eventually sin x
stops increasing altogether and starts decreasing. In other words, f'(x) drops to zero
when , and becomes -1 by the time x reaches pi (see the picture).
precisely what the cosine function does, so it should be no surprise that f'(x) = cos
x. Similar reasoning shows why it is reasonable that, when f(x)=cos x, f'(x)=-sin x.
The exact proofs of these facts you will see in a calculus class.
Now, keeping those facts in mind, what should be? If we write it in terms of real
and imaginary parts g(x) + i h(x), what should the functions g(x) and h(x) be?
The key is to take the derivative. It is only reasonable to define in such a way
that it still has the same properties as mentioned above, namely, the derivative of
But f'(x) should also equal g'(x) + i h'(x), so we are looking for a pair of functions g
and h for which h' = g and g' = -h. This is exactly the same interrelationship that the
sine and cosine functions have, as we saw above. It also turns out that these two
equations, together with the conditions g(0)=1 and h(0)=0 that arise from the fact
It follows from all this that g must be the cosine function and h must be the sine