What are imaginary numbers?? Why can’t the square root of a negative be real?
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No real number, multiplied by itself (squared) will result in a negative number. 2×2 = 4. (-2)x(-2) also = 4. What real number can you square to get -4? There isn’t one.
However, it turns out that square roots of negative numbers are useful tools for a number of mathematical applications, so we still use them, but have to come up with some different term because they don’t belong to the set of real numbers. So, someone coined ‘imaginary’ as the opposite of ‘real’.
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