ADAM CLEMENTS – SME 430 – Discussion Post #3 – 2/2/2010

After you have done the reading for this week, please post your reflections to the following
questions.

1. Why did it take such a long time for people to accept the concepts of negative numbers?
Imaginary numbers?
• It was hard to accept the fact of a negative number because numbers started or came
about from counting and measuring. Thus, one might ask how can you have less than
zero things or less than zero length. So, in the beginning, a negative number didn’t
have a purpose. However, when people began to solve equations negative numbers
began to show themselves. 7 + x = 12 where x is 5. Yet, what if the equation was 7 +
x = 4. Now x is equal to -3. Egypt and Mesopotamia could do equations like these for
three thousand years but they never used or thought to use negative numbers. The
Chinese were able to handle negative numbers in intermediate steps, but Western
culture was rooted in Greek, which thought of numbers as being “positive whole
numbers.”
• In 7th century India, positive numbers were possession and negative numbers were
seen as debts. Using this idea, they had rules for adding, subtracting, multiplying and
dividing with negative numbers. Later European mathematics developed a “law of
signs” understanding that a negative times a negative is positive, and a negative times
a positive is a negative. However, this was only applied to problems involving
subtraction whose answer was still positive. By the early 17th century however,
negative numbers were becoming too useful to ignore. Europeans began to look at
negative numbers and square roots which led to the fist thought of a negative root, or
a “false” solution which they began to call “imaginary.” Even before this in the
5160’s Rafael Bombelli whoshowed that sometimes the square root of a negative
number was needed in order to find real solutions meaning that just because a
negative square root was involved, didn’t mean the problem was unsolvable. Later,
distinction was made between “true roots” (real positive), “false roots” (real
negative), and “imaginary roots” (complex). Issues with negative numbers didn’t
arise from not being able to add, subtract, multiply, or divide with them, but instead
issues came from the theory or idea of negative numbers themselves.
• In the mid 18th century, negative numbers were finally accepted as numbers. Then in
the 19th century, the study of algebraic systems became the focus, meaning that
negative numbers became extremely important and any doubt of their legitimacy as a
number vanished.

2. What shifts in people's conceptions of numbers were required to accept negative numbers?
Imaginary numbers?
• In the beginning, people only used number for counting and measuring. However,
when they began to use math and numbers for more complex things like solving
equations, negative numbers began to become useful to do this. Thus, as the need for
a negative number system arose, people began to accept them. Same was true for
imaginary numbers. When they began to look at how negative numbers fit into square
roots, they needed to describe this “false” answer in some way thus calling it
 imaginary. Furthermore, people could do many mathematical computations with
negative numbers. Complications or skepticism occurred when they thought of the
idea or theory behind the negative number versus the actual number itself. And as
more people used them, the fact that they were so useful began to outweigh any
concerns they had with negative numbers.

3. What new mathematics was made possible by using negative numbers? Imaginary
numbers?
• Parts of algebra and number theory were made possible by negative numbers.
Parts of algebra, “complex” calculus, and number theory were made possible by
imaginary numbers.