Why can’t you invent an imaginary number for division by zero like you can for a square root of a negative?
In: Mathematics
I think the truth is we got lucky with imaginary numbers. I don’t know the history, but it’s not really correct to say that i is the square root of minus 1, in the way that we normally understand square roots. We sort of stumbled onto a whole system of arithmetic, which contains the real numbers within it, and in which there’s a “number” that when “multiplied” by itself gives – 1. Which is neat. But it wasn’t invented exactly.
Someone might stumble on something analogous to that for 1/0, or might have already (possibly in multiple ways). But it wouldn’t really be division as we know it.
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