ABSTRACT
When secondary school students are first introduced to imaginary numbers, they find the whole topic somewhat baffling. Although they usually do not have too much trouble with the manipulation of complex numbers, they are usually bewildered by their meaning. This chapter begins by talking about some of the interesting issues with complex numbers, and then addresses many of the topics included in precalculus courses, and finally connects them to higher-level concepts in mathematics. Mathematicians began examining expressions involving square roots of negative numbers, specifically with the symbol -1. There is a very interesting problem that one finds in an old book, One Two Three … Infinity by George Gamow, originally published in 1957 and republished in 1988. It is a delightful application of the rotational property of multiplying by i. One of the nice connections between trigonometry and complex numbers is the fact that every complex number can be expressed in trigonometric form.
