Zero and Imaginary Numbers
Date: 07/18/2001 at 23:35:24 From: Angela Cherie Aninao Subject: Zero and imaginary numbers My teacher said that zero divided by an imaginary number is zero. Is this true? How can the answer be in the real number line when the divisor can't be found in the real number line?
Date: 07/19/2001 at 10:26:32 From: Doctor Rick Subject: Re: Zero and imaginary numbers Hi, Angela. Your problem is with 0/i = 0. You'd have the same difficulty with 0*i = 0, I assume. These are pretty straightforward: zero times anything, and zero divided by anything except zero, is zero. That doesn't change when you go from real numbers to complex numbers. But what do you think about i*i = -1? Here *both* numbers are imaginary, and the answer is real! Let's forget about complex numbers for a moment. Hmm ... I also notice that -1 times -1 is 1. How can the answer be positive when neither factor can be found in the positive numbers? Do you see how this is similar to i*i = -1? There is nothing wrong with the result of an operation on a "new" kind of number being an "old" kind of number. We invent the "new" numbers so that we can solve problems that couldn't be solved using the "old" numbers alone. But the "new" numbers aren't a group off by themselves that have nothing to do with the "old" numbers. Rather, we *extend* the number system by adding the "new" numbers to it. A whole number (positive integer, the first kind you learned about) is a member of the integers just as much as a negative number (which was once "new" for you) is an integer. Likewise, a real number is a member of the complex numbers just as much as an imaginary number (your current "new" type) is. What I'm getting at is that the result of an operation with complex numbers must be complex, but the result of an operation with imaginary numbers need not be imaginary. We say that the real numbers - the "old" system - are "closed under multiplication" because the product of two real numbers is always real. (Division is multiplication by a reciprocal, so the real numbers are also closed under division, except for zero which has no reciprocal.) Likewise the complex numbers - the "new" system - are closed under multiplication. But the pure imaginary numbers (like 2i) are not a closed system, nor are the non-real complex numbers (like 2+3i): they simply extend one closed system (the reals) to make another (the complex numbers). If you found that one real number times another real number gave a non-real answer, that would be a problem, because the real numbers should be closed under multiplication. But there is nothing wrong with a multiplication of imaginary numbers giving a non-imaginary number; the answer just has to be complex. Zero (or -1) is a complex number as well as a real number, so we don't have a problem. - Doctor Rick, The Math Forum http://mathforum.org/dr.math/
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