Imaginary Schminaginary

Real numbers are the numbers that you probably already know: they're the ones on the number line. Contrary to what some people might tell you though, imaginary numbers, are not numbers that only exist in the brains of weird people. Or maybe they are; all numbers in math are "imaginary" in the sense that you can't touch them or experience them directly. But this is not what people mean when they talk about imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers are numbers that can be written as a real number times i or a + bi. So, what is i? It's the square root of -1. i is NOT a real number. i was invented because mathematicians wanted to do more math and not have to stop when they had to take square roots of negative numbers.

Rene Descartes (DAY-CART) was the first to use the term “imaginary” number in 1637. However, imaginary numbers were discovered much earlier by Gerlamo Cardono in the 1500s but they were not widely accepted until the work of Leonhard Euler (1707–1783 ) and Carl Friedrich Johan Gauss (177 7–1855).