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Darrera modificació: 2026-03-04
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Sinkevich, Galina I., "On the Development of a Complex Number Interpretation from the 16th to the End of the 19th century", Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, 73/1 (2023), 172-207.
- Resum
- We will look at the development of geometric concepts of complex and negative numbers during the period from the 16th to the 20th century. For a long time, these numbers, being obtained analytically, could not find their interpretation; they were called false and imaginary. In 1544, M. Stifel expressed the idea that negative numbers are numbers less than zero. It was a seditious thought because zero meant “nothing” and there could be nothing less than “nothing.” At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, this interpretation of negative numbers was embodied in chronology (countdown, before and after the birth of Christ), and in the 18th century, it began to be used in the temperature scale. Attempts at a geometric interpretation of imaginary numbers were undertaken by J. Wallis, G. Leibniz, I. Bernoulli, A. Moivre. L. Euler advanced further than others, who began to depict complex numbers as points on a plane, introduced trigonometric and exponential forms, almost simultaneously with d'Alembert introduced the condition for the analyticity of a function, noticed the symmetry of the function of the conjugate argument, introduced the symbol of an imaginary number. K. Wessel, K. Gauss, and then Argand introduced the complex plane and the geometric interpretation of complex numbers as directed segments, and operations on them. This led W. Hamilton to the concept of quaternion, and his followers to the creation of vector calculus. How much easier the presentation of physics, geodesy, theory of electrical networks, and other applications thanks to complex numbers and vectors!
- Matèries
- Història de la ciència
- URL
- https://www.brepolsonline.net/content/journals/10.1 ...
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