A review by mathstalio
An Imaginary Tale: The Story of the Square Root of Minus One by Paul J. Nahin

2.0

I read this with the thought that it would be a history of imaginary numbers (it was) and their applications (ehhhh). The author starts out with an intro that says any student who has taken high school calculus should be able to follow the math of the book. Definitely not. I mean, I could have followed the included calculations but I chose not to because it was simply unnecessary to show the entire derivation of formulas. Tell me ABOUT them and where they came from. That's what I was hoping this book would be. Maybe it's unfair to judge a book on what you wanted it to be, but. Here we are. Too calculation heavy, I wanted more history and DESCRIPTIONS of applications. Although I did learn enough to be able to give my students a bit more background on complex numbers when we get to them.