Finding Peace in the Complex Plane
Channel: Doug Sweetser
Date: 2021-08-22

The visual representation of real versus imaginary numbers in the complex plane bothered me from the start. There is visually no difference but that is a problem since algebraically the two behave differently. The visual representation is not faithful to the algebraic representation. Consider the following mapping: real is time, imaginary is space. A reflection about time will require one to remember what happened to see if the future pattern of events was like the past. A reflection about space will act as a mirror and one should see a pair of points.