What are imaginary numbers?? Why can’t the square root of a negative be real?
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The reason that the square root of a negative number isn’t real, is because it violates the rules of mathematics.
The square root of 25 is 5. Or -5. Because 5 x 5 is 25, and -5 x -5 is 25 too, thus the square root of 25 is ±5.
We can’t take the square root of -25 because there’s no number that, when squared, yields a product of -25. You need to multiply a positive number by a negative number in order to get a negative product.
However, if we were to pretend that negative numbers had square roots, we’d get imaginary numbers. They behave in predictable ways. So we have defined a number, *i*, such that *i*^2 = −1
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