Imaginary Number Inventor

name         Twinky
status       student
grade        9-12
location     WA

Question -   What mathematician (or person) invented imaginary 
numbers? or rather, who developed using them?
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Like many mathematical/scientific concepts "imaginary numbers" was 
more a process than a single invention. The Greeks were aware of 
the problem of square roots of negative numbers, but dismissed them 
as ridiculous and unworthy of discussion. Cardano (1501-1576) 
called them "fictitious". Bombelli (1526-1572) ran into them in his 
studies of cubic equations, but didn't know what to make of them. 
The English mathematician Wallis (1660-1703) introduced the idea of 
expressing them on coordinate axes, but it is not clear he 
understood their underlying importance. As is often the case it 
took a genius to engage a concept whose time had come, and it was 
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) who finally recognized and 
formalized the algebra of "complex numbers". The dates are 
especially noteworthy because the algebra of complex numbers 
arrived just in time for their necessity in physics. The date 1855 
being just 50 years before Einstein's miraculous year of 1905!

Vince Calder
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