What is "imaginary numbers"

Usage examples of "imaginary numbers".

The twists and convolutions, the half-random whorls and skeins of intricate flesh that had made up that rapacious totality had been functions of some unthinkable, inhuman symmetry, cells multiplying like obscure and imaginary numbers.

A more serious difference between Nar and human Conceptualization was that imaginary numbers had no meaning for the Nar.

Then he sat down to work in purposeful isolation, tracing whatever relationships he could find between the common whole numbers fourteen, twenty-eight and fifty-seven, soon extending his search to include fractions where there had been integers alone, negative quantities where positive had prevailed, imaginary numbers to replace the real, managing in a remote part of his mind to watch himself at work, an old man (cuter than most) in a small old cluttered study, wearing a robe and peeling slippers, sitting at an oak desk rough to the touch because it was layered with the sprinkled pink grains of his brush eraser, thriving on plain food, irregular sleep, constant work, finding himself pleased by this history of his future, a factually accurate illusion, electric heater on the floor .

A disheveled-looking man walked by the balcony, counting imaginary numbers on his fingers and muttering loudly in what sounded like anguished Russian.

When we come on to the more complicated case of the M-Set, where the bearing is important, there's a very neat mathematical trick which takes care of it, by using complex or imaginary numbers (which really aren't at all complex, still less imaginary).

The next question involved imaginary numbers, transfinite numbers, Kantor's number, and several other numbers, all applied to something called lobachevskian geometry.

Like the world of imaginary numbers, the square root of minus one.

Eventually we may find a use for them, perhaps in the same way we use imaginary numbers to find the roots of equations of a higher order than two.

He was also an ex-mathematician named Arthur Bloomberg who had gone slightly over the edge during his research with imaginary numbers.

In Arthur's case, the study of imaginary numbers had the unfortunate tendency to illuminate the existential spirit.

On every side the walls of stone ascended, so that to look at any one of them was to believe, for a moment at least, that gravity had been twisted until it stood at right angles to its proper self by some sorcerer's multiplication with imaginary numbers, and the height I saw was properly the level surface of the world.

Chex had thought they would be in the region of imaginary numbers that they had left, but they were in the first stage, with the zombie vegetation.

I must stop this or I shall soon be writing imaginary numbers in the margin: gleefully adding that which each day I glumly must subtract.

But as far as the chief engineer could see, the coordinates to which he had set the transporter contained imaginary numbers.

It was his work on imaginary numbers that drove him slightly over the edge&mdash.