Podcast Transcript

[Intro Music made by Aidan Simmons in 2016 using LMMS]

“Hello everyone and welcome back to the MathCast with your host Aidan Simmons,

today we’re going to be looking at a piece of conventional wisdom, breaking it, and getting a

taste of all the interesting consequences that follow from it. You’re all probably familiar with

square roots, and the idea that it’s impossible to take a square root of a negative number. After all

there’s no real number you can square and get a negative value, both negative and positive values

are positive when squared and zero doesn’t get us anywhere either. Well what if we pretend there

is a number, an imaginary number, which equals -1 when squared? Mathematicians have done

this and it opens up a whole world of both strange and useful math, and allows us to create the

fundamental theorem of algebra. We call this new square root of -1 value “i”, the imaginary unit.

The set of all numbers we can create after introducing this new “i” value is called the Complex

Numbers, and as it turns out this creates a number system where numbers exist in two

dimensions rather than on a line. Every complex number can be represented by two real

numbers, a and b, in the form a + b*i. We call a the real part and bi the imaginary part, with b as

the coefficient of i. Now I’m going to leave you all with something to consider. How could you

determine the result of squaring any complex number? See if you can write this in terms of just

a, b, and i. Until next time this has been the Math cast with Aidan Simmons.”

[Outro Music made by Aidan Simmons in 2016 using LMMS]