Imagining Numbers

"A poetic and profound meditation on the mathematical imagination" reveals how the imaginary number was first imagined, and how to imagine it yourself (The Christian Science Monitor).

Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen) is Barry Mazur's invitation to those who take delight in the imaginative work of reading poetry, but may have no background in math, to make a leap of the imagination in mathematics. Imaginary numbers entered into mathematics in sixteenth-century...