42 questions linked to/from Do complex numbers really exist?
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### What is a simple, physical situation where complex numbers emerge naturally? [duplicate]

I'm trying to teach middle schoolers about the emergence of complex numbers and I want to motivate this organically. By this, I mean some sort of real world problem that people were trying to solve ...
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### An example of an easy to understand undecidable problem

I am looking for an undecidable problem that I could give as an easy example in a presentation to the general public. I mean easy in the sense that the mathematics behind it can be described, well, ...
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### Reference on polynomial equation that demonstrates the history of complex numbers

Pardon my ignorance and lack of thorough understanding, but I am missing a piece of the puzzle when it comes to complex numbers and can't seem to find an answer. I have been trying to understand ...
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### Mathematical misconceptions and how to combat them

There are a lot of common misconceptions when it comes to math. A common one that has already been addressed on this site is $1 \neq .999\cdots$, as is that imaginary numbers "do not exist". Another ...
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### The meaning of i [duplicate]

Can someone kind explain the mathematical quantity i to me (which is the square root of -1)? Just to be clear, I'm not actually trying to understand i per se, I'm just trying to understand how it can ...
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### What are imaginary numbers?

At school I really struggled to understand the concept of imaginary numbers. My teacher told us that an imaginary number is a number which has something to do with the square root of $-1$. When I ...
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### How can I introduce complex numbers to precalculus students?

I teach a precalculus course almost every semester, and over these semesters I've found various things that work quite well. For example, when talking about polynomials and rational functions, in ...
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### Can a circle truly exist?

Is a circle more impossible than any other geometrical shape? Is a circle is just an infinitely-sided equilateral parallelogram? Wikipedia says... A circle is a simple shape of Euclidean geometry ...
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### Two fractions in $R[\frac{1}{x}]$ are equal iff $(\exists n\ge 0)(x^n\cdot ax^i=x^n\cdot bx^j)$

Given a ring $R$ and an element $x\in R$, we can adjoint the inverse of $x$ by ring extension $R[\frac{1}{x}]=R[x,y]/\langle xy-1\rangle$, so any elements in $R[\frac{1}{x}]$ is of form $\frac{a}{x^i}$...