When I met up with the concept of the square root of minus one for the first time I was a busey minded child, with a pile of old popular science books and even older text books to rummage through.
In one of them, I think it was called “mathematicians delight”, there was a bit about how you could have a number that when multiplied by itself gave ¯1, a major oddity then, to me.
I was used to numbers mis-behaving like this. The author described how to do maths with this number he called i and then said that you could do geometry with it.This did not worry me then. I was used to adult twitties like this. Some years after this I learned about complex numbers, rather than just reading about them.
In a snide and more mathematically educated spirit I hope to have APL calcuate the square root of minus one by typing ¯1*÷2 into an unsuspecting laptop, to see if APL can detect the need for complex numbers.
poor-darrens-almanack 