Before I get started on this let me first make it clear that this document is not intended to teach you everything there is to know about complex numbers. That is a subject that can (and does) take a whole course to cover. The purpose of this document is to give you a brief overview of complex numbers, notation associated with complex numbers, and some of the basic operations involving complex numbers. This document has been written with the assumption that you’ve seen complex numbers at some point in the past, know (or at least knew at some point in. | Complex Numbers Primer Complex Numbers Primer Before I get started on this let me first make it clear that this document is not intended to teach you everything there is to know about complex numbers. That is a subject that can and does take a whole course to cover. The purpose of this document is to give you a brief overview of complex numbers notation associated with complex numbers and some of the basic operations involving complex numbers. This document has been written with the assumption that you ve seen complex numbers at some point in the past know or at least knew at some point in time that complex numbers can be solutions to quadratic equations know or recall i i-1 and that you ve seen how to do basic arithmetic with complex numbers. If you don t remember how to do arithmetic I will show an example or two to remind you how to do arithmetic but I m going to assume that you don t need more than that as a reminder. For most students the assumptions I ve made above about their exposure to complex numbers is the extent of their exposure. Problems tend to arise however because most instructors seem to assume that either students will see beyond this exposure in some later class or have already seen beyond this in some earlier class. Students are then all of a sudden expected to know more than basic arithmetic of complex numbers but often haven t actually seen it anywhere and have to quickly pick it up on their own in order to survive in the class. That is the purpose of this document. We will go beyond the basics that most students have seen at some point and show you some of the notation and operations involving complex numbers that many students don t ever see once they learn how to deal with complex numbers as solutions to quadratic equations. We ll also be seeing a slightly different way of looking at some of the basics that you probably didn t see when you were first introduced to complex numbers and proving some of the basic facts. The first section is a
