infinitesimals, yet is taught using different approaches today.

There are
often analogies and insights hidden inside the original formulation which
can be lost in the modern version.
• Try to imagine every arithmetic operation as "transforming" a number
(sliding, scaling, growing, rotating, etc.). Of course, this isn’t useful for
everyday math, but when learning a new concept (like imaginaries) or
trying to break down relationships in a formula, it can help to study the
most basic pieces. See ing x 2 = 9 as 1·x 2 = 9 was a tremendous perspective
shift for me. It asks "What is x 2 doing to the number 1 in order to make
it 9?".
• We might think that "subtracting 1" can turn 1 into -1 in two steps. The
key is to realize that the operation must be the same, and not use any
information. No matter if you started at 1 or 36, each step x in "x 2 " must
be the same, without knowing anything about the original value (it is
performed on the original value, but "x" doesn’t know what that amount
was). In this case, the command "x" is "rotate 90 degrees" – and you will
be at a negative number after two commands. Repeating the command
"subtract 1" would not work to turn 36 into -36.
• Can you take numbers into more dimensions? You bet! The quaternions
are one way to represent more dimensions to rotate, and are used in
video games. However, after a certain amount, we’ll run out of letters –
and it becomes easier to keep track of our dimensions with matrices.

Chapter 6: Complex Arithmetic

• We can show that complex multiplication does add the angles with the
sine and cosine addition formulas (never thought those would come in
handy, eh?). Let our complex numbers be z1 = cos A + i sin A and z2 =
cos B +i sin B (they have distance 1, and lie on the unit circle). Multiplying
gives: z3 = (cos A cos B − sin A sin B ) + i · (sin A cos B + cos A sin B ). The real
part of this is cos(A + B ) and the imaginary part is sin(A + B ), when we
compare them to the sine and cosine angle addition formulas. This is a
bit brute-force, but we can see that the components of complex numbers,
when multiplied, do combine to give the same sine and cosine as if we’d
added the angles directly. The good news is you don’t need to memorize
sine and cosine formulas again – you can use the arithmetic of complex
numbers to derive them (see the notes on Euler’s formaul).
• Seeing the purpose of the complex conjugate as a way to "cancel" the
imaginary part of a complex number made it much more intuitive for
me. Rather than memorizing definitions, try to see its purpose – the
conjugate is a mirror-image on the imaginary side, just like the negative
is the mirror image of the real side.
• Why do we leavep i in formulas like a + bi but out of others, such as
mag ni t ud e = a 2 + b 2 ? I think of i as a descriptive element – it tells
us what type of number "b" is (imaginary). When doing calculations on