Front cover image for Imagining numbers : (particularly the square root of minus fifteen)

Imagining numbers : (particularly the square root of minus fifteen)

Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen) is Barry Mazur's invitation to those who take delight in the imaginative work of reading poetry, but may have no background in math, to make a leap of the imagination in mathematics. Imaginary numbers entered into mathematics in sixteenth-century Italy and were used with immediate success, but nevertheless presented an intriguing challenge to the imagination. It took more than two hundred years for mathematicians to discover a satisfactory way of "imagining" these numbers--Publisher's description
Print Book, English, 2003
Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2003
xvi, 270 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm
9780374174699, 9780312421878, 0374174695, 0312421877
49959463
The imagination and square roots
Square roots and the imagination
Looking at numbers
Permission and laws
Economy of expression
Justifying laws
Bombelli's puzzle
Stretching the image
Putting geometry into numbers
Seeing the geometry in the numbers
The literature of discovery of geometry in numbers
Understanding algebra via geometry
Appendix: The quadratic formula