What is the use/need of complex numbers in real life if they are imaginary?
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“imaginary” is just a naming convention.
All numbers are imaginary. They’re an abstract concept that reflects reality in one way or another. You can’t hold a number in your hand. Numbers are a property of things – and that’s what makes them useful.
And even then, only positive integers have any simple, intuitive relation to actual objects. Fractions, negative numbers, even zero are all things we made up because they were useful concepts, but they’re all in one way or another removed from the simple concept of numbers like three or five thousand.
Complex numbers are no different, they’re just even less intuitive to most people than, say, fractions because they’re taught later and are used for more abstract calculations.
But make no mistake – even mathematicians at one point strongly objected even to the IDEA of irrational numbers, of negative numbers, even of zero. Today it seems absurd that zero would be a tricky idea to wrap one’s head around, but it used to be the case even for people who dealt with mathematics in-depth.
As to where they’re actually useful – in many situations where you need to consider two values that are related but can’t be directly added to one another, or where you want to express something as numbers but you have more than one axis to work on, complex numbers are a useful tool. It can be complex stuff like physics, but it can be straightforward stuff like measuring angles/directions for navigation.
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