Whoever coined the terms ‘complex numbers’ with a ‘real part’ and ‘imaginary part’ really screwed a lot of people..

How come? They are part real numbers, what would you call the other part?

	▲	creata 17 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Iirc Gauss suggested "lateral numbers". Not the worst idea, but it's too late now.
	▲	maxbond 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		We could've called the imaginaries "orthogonals", "perpendiculars", "complications", "atypicals", there's a million other options. I like the idea that a number is complex because it has a "complicated component".
	▲	srean 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Twisted ? Rotated ?
	▲	d--b an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I mean that they're not really numbers. Usually they explain it something like: oh, at first people didn't know what 2-5 added up to, but then we invented negative numbers. Well, complex numbers are that but for square roots of negative numbers. But that's a completely misleading way to explain these things. Complex numbers aren't numbers aren't numbers really.