In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Tim Daneliuk wrote: > No, but go to my other example of an aircraft in flight and winds > aloft. It is exactly the case that complex numbers provide a convenient > way to add these two "vectors" (don't wince, please) to provide the > effective speed and direction of the aircraft. Numerous such examples > abound in physics, circuit analysis, the analysis of rotating machinery, > etc.
Not really. The thing with complex numbers is that they're numbers--mathematically, they comprise a "number system" with operations called "addition", "subtraction", "multiplication" and "division" having certain well-defined properties (e.g. associativity of multiplication, all numbers except possibly one not having a multiplicative inverse). An aircraft in flight amidst winds needs only vector addition (and possibly scalar multiplication) among the basic operations to compute its path--you don't need to work with complex numbers as such for that purpose. For my AC circuit theory example, however, you do. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
