Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-25975584-20150412225756/@comment-25101089-20150420070645

Noooooooooo imaginary numbers are not useless. They are extremely useful in physics, engineering, 3D programming, and mathematics, and have some extremely beautiful mathematical properties. The only reason they are called 'imaginary' is that historically mathematicians couldn't accept them because they didn't see a use, but those same mathematicians also thought negative numbers were useless, and nobody today would agree with that.

Also, all numbers are imaginary. Where is 2 or -3 or 1/2 in nature? No, not 2 rocks or -3 dollars or 1/2 a pizza, the actual number itself. There is no such thing as -3, it's just a convenient trick to represent the idea of 'deficit', and those are not 2 rocks - they are localised clumpings of the quark and electron fields. The universe is continuous and has no concept of 'whole number'. All numbers are constructs of the human mind and are therefore all equally imaginary, and only useful as long as we have a use for them.