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32 Answers 32

The nicest elementary illustration I know of the relevance of complex numbers to calculus is its link to radius of convergence, which student learn how to compute by various tests, but more mechanically than conceptually. The series for $1/(1-x)$, $\log(1+x)$, and $\sqrt{1+x}$ have radius of convergence 1 and we can see why: there's a problem at one of the endpoints of the interval of convergence (the function blows up or it's not differentiable). However, the function $1/(1+x^2)$ is nice and smooth on the whole real line with no apparent problems, but its radius of convergence at the origin is 1. From the viewpoint of real analysis this is strange: why does the series stop converging? Well, if you look at distance 1 in the complex plane...

More generally, you can tell them that for any rational function $p(x)/q(x)$, in reduced form, the radius of convergence of this function at a number $a$ (on the real line) is precisely the distance from $a$ to the nearest zero of the denominator, even if that nearest zero is not real. In other words, to really understand the radius of convergence in a general sense you have to work over the complex numbers. (Yes, there are subtle distinctions between smoothness and analyticity which are relevant here, but you don't have to discuss that to get across the idea.)

Similarly, the function $x/(e^x-1)$ is smooth but has a finite radius of convergence $2\pi$ (not sure if you can make this numerically apparent). Again, on the real line the reason for this is not visible, but in the complex plane there is a good explanation.

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Thanks, Keith! That's a nice point which I always mention for real analysis students as well. The structure of singularities of a linear differential equation (under some mild conditions) fully determines the convergence of the series solving the DE. The generating series for Bernoulli numbers does not produce sufficiently good approximations to $2\pi$, but it's just beautiful by itself. –  Wadim Zudilin Jul 2 '10 at 5:14

You can solve the differential equation y''+y=0 using complex numbers. Just write $$(\partial^2 + 1) y = (\partial +i)(\partial -i) y$$ and you are now dealing with two order one differential equations that are easily solved $$(\partial +i) z =0,\qquad (\partial -i)y =z$$ The multivariate case is a bit harder and uses quaternions or Clifford algebras. This was done by Dirac for the Schrodinger equation ($-\Delta \psi = i\partial_t \psi$), and that led him to the prediction of the existence of antiparticles (and to the Nobel prize).

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Students usually find the connection of trigonometric identities like $\sin(a+b)=\sin a\cos b+\cos a\sin b$ to multiplication of complex numbers striking.

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Not sure about the students, but I do. :-) –  Wadim Zudilin Jul 1 '10 at 12:21
This is an excellent suggestion. I can never remember these identities off the top of my head. Whenever I need one of them, the simplest way (faster than googling) is to read them off from $(a+ib)(c+id)=(ac-bd) + i(ad+bc)$. –  alex Jul 1 '10 at 20:35
When I first started teaching calculus in the US, I was surprised that many students didn't remember addition formulas for trig functions. As the years went by, it's gotten worse: now the whole idea of using an identity like that to solve a problem is alien to them, e.g. even if they may look it up doing the homework, they "get stuck" on the problem and "don't get it". What is there to blame: calculators? standard tests that neglect it? teachers who never understood it themselves? Anyway, it's a very bad omen. –  Victor Protsak Jul 2 '10 at 1:43
@Victor: It can be worse... When I taught Calc I at U of Toronto to engineering students, I was approached by some students who claimed they had heard words "sine" and "cosine" but were not quite sure what they meant. –  Yuri Bakhtin Jul 2 '10 at 8:51

From "Birds and Frogs" by Freeman Dyson [Notices of Amer. Math. Soc. 56 (2009) 212--223]:

One of the most profound jokes of nature is the square root of minus one that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger put into his wave equation when he invented wave mechanics in 1926. Schrödinger was a bird who started from the idea of unifying mechanics with optics. A hundred years earlier, Hamilton had unified classical mechanics with ray optics, using the same mathematics to describe optical rays and classical particle trajectories. Schrödinger’s idea was to extend this unification to wave optics and wave mechanics. Wave optics already existed, but wave mechanics did not. Schrödinger had to invent wave mechanics to complete the unification. Starting from wave optics as a model, he wrote down a differential equation for a mechanical particle, but the equation made no sense. The equation looked like the equation of conduction of heat in a continuous medium. Heat conduction has no visible relevance to particle mechanics. Schrödinger’s idea seemed to be going nowhere. But then came the surprise. Schrödinger put the square root of minus one into the equation, and suddenly it made sense. Suddenly it became a wave equation instead of a heat conduction equation. And Schrödinger found to his delight that the equation has solutions corresponding to the quantized orbits in the Bohr model of the atom. It turns out that the Schrödinger equation describes correctly everything we know about the behavior of atoms. It is the basis of all of chemistry and most of physics. And that square root of minus one means that nature works with complex numbers and not with real numbers. This discovery came as a complete surprise, to Schrödinger as well as to everybody else. According to Schrödinger, his fourteen-year-old girl friend Itha Junger said to him at the time, "Hey, you never even thought when you began that so much sensible stuff would come out of it." All through the nineteenth century, mathematicians from Abel to Riemann and Weierstrass had been creating a magnificent theory of functions of complex variables. They had discovered that the theory of functions became far deeper and more powerful when it was extended from real to complex numbers. But they always thought of complex numbers as an artificial construction, invented by human mathematicians as a useful and elegant abstraction from real life. It never entered their heads that this artificial number system that they had invented was in fact the ground on which atoms move. They never imagined that nature had got there first.

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Here are two simple uses of complex numbers that I use to try to convince students that complex numbers are "cool" and worth learning.

  1. (Number Theory) Use complex numbers to derive Brahmagupta's identity expressing $(a^2+b^2)(c^2+d^2)$ as the sum of two squares, for integers $a,b,c,d$.

  2. (Euclidean geometry) Use complex numbers to explain Ptolemy's Theorem. For a cyclic quadrilateral with vertices $A,B,C,D$ we have $$\overline{AC}\cdot \overline{BD}=\overline{AB}\cdot \overline{CD} +\overline{BC}\cdot \overline{AD}$$

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And even more amazingly, one can completely solve the diophantine equation $x^2+y^2=z^n$ for any $n$ as follows: $$x+yi=(a+bi)^n, \ z=a^2+b^2.$$ I learned this from a popular math book while in elementary school, many years before studying calculus. –  Victor Protsak Jul 2 '10 at 1:21

If the students have had a first course in differential equations, tell them to solve the system

$$x'(t) = -y(t)$$ $$y'(t) = x(t).$$

This is the equation of motion for a particle whose velocity vector is always perpendicular to its displacement. Explain why this is the same thing as

$$(x(t) + iy(t))' = i(x(t) + iy(t))$$

hence that, with the right initial conditions, the solution is

$$x(t) + iy(t) = e^{it}.$$

On the other hand, a particle whose velocity vector is always perpendicular to its displacement travels in a circle. Hence, again with the right initial conditions, $x(t) = \cos t, y(t) = \sin t$. (At this point you might reiterate that complex numbers are real $2 \times 2$ matrices, assuming they have seen this method for solving systems of differential equations.)

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One of my favourite elementary applications of complex analysis is the evaluation of infinite sums of the form $$\sum_{n\geq 0} \frac{p(n)}{q(n)}$$ where $p,q$ are polynomials and $\deg q > 1 + \deg p$, by using residues.

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One cannot over-emphasize that passing to complex numbers often permits a great simplification by linearizing what would otherwise be more complex nonlinear phenomena. One example familiar to any calculus student is the fact that integration of rational functions is much simpler over $\mathbb C$ (vs. $\mathbb R$) since partial fraction decompositions involve at most linear (vs quadratic) polynomials in the denominator. Similarly one reduces higher-order constant coefficient differential and difference equations to linear (first-order) equations by factoring the linear operators over $\mathbb C$. More generally one might argue that such simplification by linearization was at the heart of the development of abstract algebra. Namely, Dedekind, by abstracting out the essential linear structures (ideals and modules) in number theory, greatly simplified the prior nonlinear theory based on quadratic forms. This enabled him to exploit to the hilt the power of linear algebra. Examples abound of the revolutionary power that this brought to number theory and algebra - e.g. for one little-known gem see my recent post explaining how Dedekind's notion of conductor ideal beautifully encapsulates the essence of elementary irrationality proofs of n'th roots.

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If you really want to "demystify" complex numbers, I'd suggest teaching what complex multiplication looks like with the following picture, as opposed to a matrix representation:

If you want to visualize the product "z w", start with '0' and 'w' in the complex plane, then make a new complex plane where '0' sits above '0' and '1' sits above 'w'. If you look for 'z' up above, you see that 'z' sits above something you name 'z w'. You could teach this picture for just the real numbers or integers first -- the idea of using the rest of the points of the plane to do the same thing is a natural extension.

You can use this picture to visually "demystify" a lot of things:

  • Why is a negative times a negative a positive? --- I know some people who lost hope in understanding math as soon as they were told this fact
  • i^2 = -1
  • (zw)t = z(wt) --- I think this is a better explanation than a matrix representation as to why the product is associative
  • |zw| = |z| |w|
  • (z + w)v = zv + wv
  • The Pythagorean Theorem: draw (1-it)(1+it) = 1 + t^2 etc.

One thing that's not so easy to see this way is the commutativity (for good reasons).

After everyone has a grasp on how complex multiplication looks, you can get into the differential equation: $\frac{dz}{dt} = i z , z(0) = 1$ which Qiaochu noted travels counterclockwise in a unit circle at unit speed. You can use it to give a good definition for sine and cosine -- in particular, you get to define $\pi$ as the smallest positive solution to $e^{i \pi} = -1$. It's then physically obvious (as long as you understand the multiplication) that $e^{i(x+y)} = e^{ix} e^{iy}$, and your students get to actually understand all those hard/impossible to remember facts about trig functions (like angle addition and derivatives) that they were forced to memorize earlier in their lives. It may also be fun to discuss how the picture for $(1 + \frac{z}{n})^n$ turns into a picture of that differential equation in the "compound interest" limit as $n \to \infty$; doing so provides a bridge to power series, and gives an opportunity to understand the basic properties of the real exponential function more intuitively as well.

But this stuff is less demystifying complex numbers and more... demystifying other stuff using complex numbers.

Here's a link to some Feynman lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics (somehow prepared for a general audience) if you really need some flat out real-world complex numbers


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  • If they have a suitable background in linear algebra, I would not omit the interpretation of complex numbers in terms of conformal matrices of order 2 (with nonnegative determinant), translating all operations on complex numbers (sum, product, conjugate, modulus, inverse) in the context of matrices: with special emphasis on their multiplicative action on the plane (in particular, "real" gives "homotety" and "modulus 1" gives "rotation").

  • The complex exponential, defined initially as limit of $(1+z/n)^n$, should be a good application of the above geometrical ideas. In particular, for $z=it$, one can give a nice interpretation of the (too often covered with mystery) equation $e^{i\pi}=-1$ in terms of the length of the curve $e^{it}$ (defined as classical total variation).

  • A brief discussion on (scalar) linear ordinary differential equations of order 2, with constant coefficients, also provides a good motivation (and with some historical truth).

  • Related to the preceding point, and especially because they are from engineering, it should be worth recalling all the useful complex formalism used in Electricity.

  • Not on the side of "real world" interpretation, but rather on the side of "useful abstraction" a brief account of the history of the third degree algebraic equation, with the embarrassing "casus impossibilis" (three real solutions, and the solution formula gives none, if taken in terms of "real" radicals!) should be very instructive. Here is also the source of such terms as "imaginary".

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@Wadim: The $(1+z/n)^n$ definition of the exponential is exactly what you get by applying Euler's method to the defining diff Eq of the exponential function, if you travel along the straight line from 0 to z in the domain, and use n equal partitions. –  Steven Gubkin Aug 27 '12 at 13:24

Several motivating physical applications are listed on wikipedia


You may want to stoke the students' imagination by disseminating the deeper truth - that the world is neither real, complex nor p-adic (these are just completions of Q). Here is a nice quote by Yuri Manin picked from here

On the fundamental level our world is neither real nor p-adic; it is adelic. For some reasons, reflecting the physical nature of our kind of living matter (e.g. the fact that we are built of massive particles), we tend to project the adelic picture onto its real side. We can equally well spiritually project it upon its non-Archimediean side and calculate most important things arithmetically. The relations between "real" and "arithmetical" pictures of the world is that of complementarity, like the relation between conjugate observables in quantum mechanics. (Y. Manin, in Conformal Invariance and String Theory, (Academic Press, 1989) 293-303 )

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They're useful just for doing ordinary geometry when programming.

A common pattern I have seen in a great many computer programs is to start with a bunch of numbers that are really ratios of distances. Theses numbers get converted to angles with inverse trig functions. Then some simple functions are applied to the angles and the trig functions are used on the results.

Trig and inverse trig functions are expensive to compute on a computer. In high performance code you want to eliminate them if possible. Quite often, for the above case, you can eliminate the trig functions. For example $\cos(2\cos^{-1} x) = 2x^2-1$ (for $x$ in a suitable range) but the version on the right runs much faster.

The catch is remembering all those trig formulae. It'd be nice to make the compiler do all the work. A solution is to use complex numbers. Instead of storing $\theta$ we store $(\cos\theta,\sin\theta)$. We can add angles by using complex multiplication, multiply angles by integers and rational numbers using powers and roots and so on. As long as you don't actually need the numerical value of the angle in radians you need never use trig functions. Obviously there comes a point where the work of doing operations on complex numbers may outweigh the saving of avoiding trig. But often in real code the complex number route is faster.

(Of course it's analogous to using quaternions for rotations in 3D. I guess it's somewhat in the spirit of rational trigonometry except I think it's easier to work with complex numbers.)

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How about how the holomorphicity of a function $f(z)=x+yi$ relates to, e.g., the curl of the vector $(x,y)\in\mathbb{R}^2$? This relates nicely to why we can solve problems in two dimensional electromagnetism (or 3d with the right symmetries) very nicely using "conformal methods." It would be very easy to start a course with something like this to motivate complex analytic methods.

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Thanks, Jeremy! I'll definitely do the search, the magic word "the method of conformal mapping" is really important here. –  Wadim Zudilin Jul 1 '10 at 11:45
I think most older Russian textbooks on complex analysis (e.g. Lavrentiev and Shabat or Markushevich) had examples from 2D hydrodynamics (Euler-D'Alambert equations $\iff$ Cauchy-Riemann equations). Also, of course, the Zhukovsky function and airwing profile. They serve more as applications of theory than motivations, since nontrivial mathematical work is required to get there. –  Victor Protsak Jul 2 '10 at 2:04

I never took a precalculus class because every identity I've ever needed involving sines and cosines I could derive by evaluating a complex exponential in two different ways. Perhaps you could tell them that if they ever forget a trig identity, they can rederive it using this method?

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In answer to

"Why do we need to study numbers which do not belong to the real world?"

you might simply state that quantum mechanics tells us that complex numbers arise naturally in the correct description of probability theory as it occurs in our (quantum) universe.

I think a good explanation of this is in Chapter 3 of the third volume of the Feynman lectures of physics, although I don't have a copy handy to check. (In particular, similar to probability theory with real numbers, the complex amplitude of one of two independent events A or B occuring is just the sum of the amplitude of A and the amplitude of B. Furthermore, the complex amplitude of A followed by B is just the product of the amplitudes. After all intermediate calculations one just takes the magnitude of the complex number squared to get the usual (real number) probability.)

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Perhaps you are referring to Feynman's book QED? –  S. Carnahan Jul 2 '10 at 4:41

Tristan Needham's book Visual Complex Analysis is full of these sorts of gems. One of my favorites is the proof using complex numbers that if you put squares on the sides of a quadralateral, the lines connecting opposite centers will be perpendicular and of the same length. After proving this with complex numbers, he outlines a proof without them that is much longer.

The relevant pages are on Google books: http://books.google.com/books?id=ogz5FjmiqlQC&lpg=PP1&dq=visual%20complex%20analysis&pg=PA16#v=onepage&q&f=false

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This is not exactly an answer to the question, but it is the simplest thing I know to help students appreciate complex numbers. (I got the idea somewhere else, but I forgot exactly where.)

It's something even much younger students can appreciate. Recall that on the real number line, multiplying a number by -1 "flips" it, that is, it rotates the point 180 degrees about the origin. Introduce the imaginary number line (perpendicular to the real number line) then introduce multiplication by i as a rotation by 90 degrees. I think most students would appreciate operations on complex numbers if they visualize them as movements of points on the complex plane.

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I now remember where I got the idea: mathoverflow.net/questions/47214/… –  Joel Reyes Noche Feb 3 '11 at 13:48

Try this: compare the problems of finding the points equidistant in the plane from (-1, 0) and (1, 0), which is easy, with finding the points at twice the distance from (-1, 0) that they are from (1, 0). The idea that "real" concepts are the only ones of use in the "real world" is of course a fallacy. I suppose it is more than a century since electrical engineers admitted that complex numbers are useful.

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I do see an undeniable benefit. If you are later asked about it in $\mathbb{R}^3$ then you use vectors and dot product. The historical way would have been to use quaternions; indeed, this is how the notion of dot product crystallized in the work of Gibbs, and more relevantly for your EE students, Oliver Heaviside. –  Victor Protsak Jul 2 '10 at 1:26

Maybe artificial, but a nice example (I think) demonstrating analytic continuation (NOT just the usual $\mathrm{Re}(e^{i \theta})$ method!) I don't know any reasonable way of doing this by real methods.

As a fun exercise, calculate $$ I(\omega) = \int_0^\infty e^{-x} \cos (\omega x) \frac{dx}{\sqrt{x}}, \qquad \omega \in \mathbb{R} $$ from the real part of $F(1+i \omega)$, where $$ F(k) = \int_0^\infty e^{-kx} \frac{dx}{\sqrt{x}}, \qquad \mathrm{Re}(k)>0 $$ (which is easily obtained for $k>0$ by a real substitution) and using analytic continuation to justify the same formula with $k=1+i \omega$.

You need care with square roots, branch cuts, etc.; but this can be avoided by considering $F(k)^2$, $I(\omega)^2$.

Of course all the standard integrals provide endless fun examples! (But the books don't have many requiring genuine analytic continuation like this!)

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I rather suspect analytic continuation is a conceptual step above what the class in question coud cope with... –  Yemon Choi Jul 8 '10 at 1:22

Consider the function f(x)=1/(1+x^2) on the real line. Using the geometric progression formula, you can expand f(x)=1-x^2+... . This series converges for |x|<1 but diverges for all other x. Why this is so? The function looks nice and smooth everywhere on the real line.

This example is taken from the Introduction of the textbook by B. V. Shabat.

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From the perspective of complex analysis, the theory of Fourier series has a very natural explanation. I take it that the students had seen Fourier series first, of course. I had mentioned this elsewhere too. I hope the students also know about Taylor theorem and Taylor series. Then one could talk also of the Laurent series in concrete terms, and argue that the Fourier series is studied most naturally in this setting.

First, instead of cos and sin, define the Fourier series using complex exponential. Then, let $f(z)$ be a complex analytic function in the complex plane, with period $1$.

Then write the substitution $q = e^{2\pi i z}$. This way the analytic function $f$ actually becomes a meromorphic function of $q$ around zero, and $z = i \infty$ corresponds to $q = 0$. The Fourier expansion of $f(z)$ is then nothing but the Laurent expansion of $f(q)$ at $q = 0$.

Thus we have made use of a very natural function in complex analysis, the exponential function, to see the periodic function in another domain. And in that domain, the Fourier expansion is nothing but the Laurent expansion, which is a most natural thing to consider in complex analysis.

I am am electrical engineer; I have an idea what they all study; so I can safely override any objections that this won't be accessible to electrical engineers. Moreover, the above will reduce their surprise later in their studies when they study signal processing and wavelet analysis.

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This answer doesn't show how the complex numbers are useful, but I think it might demystify them for students. Most are probably already familiar with its content, but it might be useful to state it again. Since the question was asked two months ago and Professor Zudilin started teaching a month ago, it's likely this answer is also too late.

If they have already taken a class in abstract algebra, one can remind them of the basic theory of field extensions with emphasis on the example of $\mathbb C \cong \mathbb R[x]/(x^2+1).$

It seems that most introductions give complex numbers as a way of writing non-real roots of polynomials and go on to show that if multiplication and addition are defined a certain way, then we can work with them, that this is consistent with handling them like vectors in the plane, and that they are extremely useful in solving problems in various settings. This certainly clarifies how to use them and demonstrates how useful they are, but it still doesn't demystify them. A complex number still seems like a magical, ad hoc construction that we accept because it works. If I remember correctly, and has probably already been discussed, this is why they were called imaginary numbers.

If introduced after one has some experience with abstract algebra as a field extension, one can see clearly that the complex numbers are not a contrivance that might eventually lead to trouble. Beginning students might be thinking this and consequently, resist them, or require them to have faith in them or their teachers, which might already be the case. Rather, one can see that they are the result of a natural operation. That is, taking the quotient of a polynomial ring over a field and an ideal generated by an irreducible polynomial, whose roots we are searching for.

Multiplication, addition, and its 2-dimensional vector space structure over the reals are then consequences of the quotient construction $\mathbb R[x]/(x^2+1).$ The root $\theta,$ which we can then relabel to $i,$ is also automatically consistent with familiar operations with polynomials, which are not ad hoc or magical. The students should also be able to see that the field extension $\mathbb C = \mathbb R(i)$ is only one example, although a special and important one, of many possible quotients of polynomial rings and maximal ideals, which should dispel ideas of absolute uniqueness and put it in an accessible context. Finally, if they think that complex numbers are imaginary, that should be corrected when they understand that they are one example of things naturally constructed from other things they are already familiar with and accept.

Reference: Dummit & Foote: Abstract Algebra, 13.1

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I always like to use complex dynamics to illustrate that complex numbers are "real" (i.e., they are not just a useful abstract concept, but in fact something that very much exist, and closing our eyes to them would leave us not only devoid of useful tools, but also of a deeper understanding of phenomena involving real numbers.) Of course I am a complex dynamicist so I am particularly partial to this approach!

Start with the study of the logistic map $x\mapsto \lambda x(1-x)$ as a dynamical system (easy to motivate e.g. as a simple model of population dynamics). Do some experiments that illustrate some of the behaviour in this family (using e.g. web diagrams and the Feigenbaum diagram), such as:

  • The period-doubling bifurcation
  • The appearance of periodic points of various periods
  • The occurrence of "period windows" everywhere in the Feigenbaum diagram.

Then let x and lambda be complex, and investigate the structure both in the dynamical and parameter plane, observing

  • The occurence of beautiful and very "natural"-looking objects in the form of Julia sets and the (double) Mandelbrot set;
  • The explanation of period-doubling as the collision of a real fixed point with a complex point of period 2, and the transition points occuring as points of tangency between interior components of the Mandelbrot set;
  • Period windows corresponding to little copies of the Mandelbrot set.

Finally, mention that density of period windows in the Feigenbaum diagram - a purely real result, established only in the mid-1990s - could never have been achieved without complex methods.

There are two downsides to this approach: * It requires a certain investment of time; even if done on a superficial level (as I sometimes do in popular maths lectures for an interested general audience) it requires the better part of a lecture * It is likely to appeal more to those that are mathematically minded than engineers who could be more impressed by useful tools for calculations such as those mentioned elsewhere on this thread.

However, I personally think there are few demonstrations of the "reality" of the complex numbers that are more striking. In fact, I have sometimes toyed with the idea of writing an introductory text on complex numbers which uses this as a primary motivation.

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Having been through the relevant mathematical mill, I subsequently engaged with Geometric Algebra (a Clifford Algebra interpreted strictly geometrically).

Once I understood that the square of a unit bivector is -1 and then how rotors worked, all my (conceptual) difficulties evaporated.

I have never had a reason to use (pure) complex numbers since and I suspect that most engineering/physics/computing types would avoid them if they were able.

Likely you have the above group mixed together with pure mathematicians that feel quite at home with the non-physical aspects of complex numbers and wouldn't dream of asking such an impertinent question:-)

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I don't think you can answer this in a single class. The best answer I can come up with is to show how complicated calculus problems can be solved easily using complex analysis.

As an example, I bet most of your students hated solving the problem $\int e^{-x}cos(x) dx.$ Solve it for them the way they learned it in calculus, by repeated integration by parts and then by $\int e^{-x}cos(x) dx=\Re \int e^{-x(1-i)}dx.$ They should notice how much easier it was to use complex analysis. If you do this enough they might come to appreciate numbers that do not belong to the real world.

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An interesting example of usage of complex numbers can be found in http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0001097 (Michael Eastwood, Roger Penrose, Drawing with Complex Numbers).

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This answer is an expansion of the answer of Yuri Bakhtin.

Here is a kind of mime show.

Silently write the formulas for $\cos(2x)$ and $\sin(2x)$ lined up on the board, something like this: $$\cos(2x) = \cos^2(x) \hphantom{+ 2 \cos(x) \sin(x)} - \sin^2(x) $$ $$\sin(2x) = \hphantom{\cos^2(x)} + 2 \cos(x) \sin(x) \hphantom{- \sin^2(x)} $$

Do the same for the formulas for $\cos(3x)$ and $\sin(3x)$, and however far you want to go: $$\cos(3x) = \cos^3(x) \hphantom{+ 3 \cos^2(x) \sin(x)} - 3 \cos(x) \sin^2(x) \hphantom{- \sin^3(x)} $$ $$\sin(3x) = \hphantom{\cos^3(x)} + 3 \cos^2(x) \sin(x) \hphantom{- 3 \cos(x) \sin^2(x)} - \sin^3(x) $$

Maybe then let out a loud noise like "hmmmmmmmmm... I recognize those numbers..."

Then, on a parallel board, write out Pascal's triangle, and parallel to that write the application of Pascal's triangle to the binomial expansions $(x+y)^n$. Make some more puzzling sounds regarding those pesky plus and minus signs.

Then maybe it's time to actually say something: "Eureka! We can tie this all together by use of an imaginary number $i = \sqrt{-1}$". Then write out the binomial expansion of $$(\cos(x) + i\,\sin(x))^n $$ break it into its real and imaginary parts, and demonstrate equality with $$\cos(nx) + i\, \sin(nx). $$

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Is it too abstract to motivate complex numbers in terms of the equations we can solve depending on whether we choose to work in ${\mathbb N, \mathbb Z, \mathbb Q, \mathbb R, \mathbb C}$? The famous "John and Betty" (http://mathforum.org/johnandbetty/) takes such an approach.

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As an example to demonstrate the usefulness of complex analysis in mechanics (which may seem counterintuitive to engineering students, since mechanics is introduced on the reals), one may consider the simple problem of the one dimensional harmonic oscillator, whose Hamiltonian equations of motion are diagonalized in the complex representation, equivalently one needs to integrate a single (holomorphic) first order ODE instead of a single second order or two first order ODEs.

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Motivating complex analysis

The physics aspect of motivation should be the strongest for engineering students. No complex numbers, no quantum mechanics, no solid state physics, no lasers, no electrical or electronic engineering (starting with impedance), no radio, TV, acoustics, no good simple way of understanding of the mechanical analogues of RLC circuits, resonance, etc., etc.

Then the "mystery" of it all. Complex numbers as the consequence of roots, square, cubic, etc., unfolding until one gets the complex plane, radii of convergence, poles of stability, all everyday engineering. Then the romance of it all, the "self secret knowledge", discovered over hundreds of years, a new language which even helps our thinking in general. Then the wider view of say Smale/Hirsch on higher dimensional differential equations, chaos etc. They should see the point pretty quickly. This is a narrow door, almost accidentally discovered, through which we see and understand entire new realms, which have become our best current, albeit imperfect,descriptions of how to understand and manipulate a kind of "inner essence of what is" for practical human ends, i.e. engineering. (True, a little over the top, but then pedagogical and motivational).

For them to say that they just want to learn a few computational tricks is a little like a student saying, "don't teach me about fire, just about lighting matches". It's up to them I suppose, but they will always be limited.

There might be some computer software engineer who needs a little more, but then I suppose there is also modern combinatorics. :-)

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