Imaginary numbers are real
Peter Doyle
Math 17: Beyond Calculus
Dartmouth College
Spring 2013
(2) MWF 1:45 - 2:50; Th 1:00–1:50
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Course texts 2
3 Mathematica 3
4 LaTeX 3
5 Organization 3
6 Monday 25 March 5
7 Thursday 28 March 5
8 Monday 1 April 6
8.1 Assignment to work on for Friday 5 April . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
9 Wednesday 3 April: Assignment for Monday 8 April 7
10 Why i? 7
1 Introduction
This course is intended as an introduction to math beyond calculus. The idea
is to introduce math that is fun, challenging, and important, and prepare
and inspire you to major in math. The primary target audience is first-
year students who have completed Math 11, 12, or 13. A motivated student
coming from Math 8 should be able to do fine. At the same time, the couse
should still be challenging to students coming out of Math 22 or 24. (There
will also be some upperclass students in the class, and I hope they will enjoy
it, but the class is primarily aimed at first-years.)
This is a topics course, with no set material that we have to go through.
This spring, the focus will be on complex numbers. Complex numbers are
deeply implicated in the structure of our universe, and they play a central
role in many areas of mathematics, as well as in physics and engineering (and
music!). It would be good for students to come to know and love them at
the start of their college careers. This will be a primary goal of the course.
We’ll be discussing a lot of other topics as well: There are plenty of other
things things students ought to come to know and love (cardinal and ordinal
numbers; quadratic reciprocity; Goedel’s theorem; the halting problem; . . . ).
Some topics will be more accessible than others, and I don’t expect all stu-
dents to follow everything. There won’t be any formal exams, though there
will be quizzes on things that I think every student should master. There
will be frequent written assignments, though most will not resemble a typical
‘problem set’. A big emphasis will be on computer explorations, and major
independent projects, which will demand a lot of work.
An important component of the course will be learning basic Mathematica
programming, and the mathematical typesetting language Latex.
2 Course texts
These books are meant as resources. We won’t read any of them cover to
cover (except for the last, which students at whom this course is aimed are
unlikely to be able to put down, once they get into it). We’ll refer to them
by the indicated nicknames.
Tale An Imaginary Tale: The Story of the Square Root of Minus One
Paul J. Nahin
ISBN-10: 0691146004 — ISBN-13: 978-0691146003
Amazon price: 11.53
http://www.amazon.com/Imaginary-Tale-Princeton-Science-Library/dp/0691146004
What What Is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Meth-
ods
Courant, Robbins, and Stewart
ISBN-10: 0195105192 — ISBN-13: 978-0195105193
Amazon price: 14.25
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-Ideas-Methods/dp/019510519
Road The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
Roger Penrose
ISBN-10: 0679776311 — ISBN-13: 978-0679776314
Amazon price: 15.75
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/dp/0679776311
Age The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn
Louisa Gilder
ISBN-10: 1400095263 — ISBN-13: 978-1400095261
Amazon price: 11.40
http://www.amazon.com/Age-Entanglement-Quantum-Physics-Vintage/dp/1400095263
3 Mathematica
Download Mathematica here:
http://caligari.dartmouth.edu/downloads/mathematica/
Note the link to the quick intro videos:
http://www.wolfram.com/broadcast/screencasts/handsonstart/
To use Mathematica, you need to be on the internal Dartmouth network,
either via an ethernet connection or WiFi to Dartmouth Secure (not Dart-
mouth Public). From off campus, you can use VPN:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/comp/internet/offcampus/vpn/juniper.html
4 LaTeX
The easiest way to use LaTeX is via LyX:
http://www.lyx.org/
Download here:
http://www.lyx.org/Download
Note that for Mac OS X you will need to install MacTeX:
http://www.tug.org/mactex
An alternative front end for LaTeX is the TeXworks interface. This comes
with MacTeX. On Windows download this:
http://www.tug.org/texlive/windows.html
5 Organization
Instructor
Peter Doyle, 331 Kemeny Hall. Instead of office hours I’ll be scheduling help
sessions. Blitz me any time to ask a question or set up a meeting.
Class meetings
The class meets in the 2 slot, MWF 1:45–2:50. We will be using the X-hour,
Th 1:00-1:50. Keep this time open!
When you will not able to attend class, I would appreciate it if you would
send me email in advance.
Components of the course
The major components of the course are assignments; occasional quizzes; and
two projects.
Assignments Assignments will be due at the beginning of class on spec-
ified due dates. Extensions will be granted in case of illness, and in case of
other pressing conflicts provided you ask in advance. Late assignments will
be marked off.
Quizzes The aim of the quizzes will be to make sure you have mastered
basic material and techniques. The main focus of the course will be the
assignments and projects.
Projects The two projects will give you a chance to do an investigation
on your own. Projects need not involve a Mathematica component, though
I expect most projects will have one. The first project will be due, in both
printed and electronic form, at the end of the seventh week of the term
(Friday 10 May). The second project will be due, in printed, electronic, and
poster form, at 4:00pm on Tuesday 28 May, when students will present their
projects at the Math Department student poster session running 4–6 pm.
The second project may be either an extension of the first project, or an
entirely new project. You may work together in pairs on these projects if
you choose.
Grading
Grades will be subjective, based on my assessment of what students have
put into and gotten out of the course. As a starting point, I will compute an
average of scaled scores on assignments, quizzes, and projects.
Honor Code
Students are encouraged to work together to do homework problems. What
is important is a student’s eventual understanding of homework problems,
and not how that is achieved. The honor principle applies to homework in
the following way. What a student turns in as a written homework solution is
to be his or her own understanding of how to do the problem. Students must
state what sources they have consulted, with whom they have collaborated,
and from whom (other than the instructor) they have received help. Students
are discouraged from using solutions to problems that may be posted on
the web, and as just stated, must reference them if they use them. The
solutions you submit must be written by you alone. Any copying (electronic
or otherwise) of another person’s solutions, in whole or in part, is a violation
of the Honor Code.
On projects, no copying of text, computer code, or graphics will be per-
mitted without prior written permission from me.
If you have any questions as to whether some action would be acceptable
under the Academic Honor Code, please speak to me, and I will be glad to
help clarify things. It is always easier to ask beforehand than to have trouble
later!
Disabilities
I encourage any students with disabilities, including ”invisible” disabilities
such as chronic diseases and learning disabilities, to discuss appropriate ac-
commodations with me, which might help you with this class, either after
class or during office hours. Dartmouth College has an active program to
help students with disabilities, and I am happy to do whatever I can to help
out, as appropriate.
Sources
• The sections on ‘honor code’ and ‘disabilities’ are adapted from Pete
Winkler’s syllabus for Math 100, Winter 2010.
6 Monday 25 March
Remember to bring your laptop along to class on Wednesday! For Wednes-
day:
1. Download and install Mathematica, and explore the ‘quick intro’ videos.
(See above.)
2. Download LyX (see above) and explore the tutorial.
3. Read [What, 1Supp.1.1 and 1.Supp.4.1–3 (pp. 21–25 and 42–48)], on
the fundamental theorem of arithmetic and the Euclidean algorithm.
This will explain what we did in class today. On Wednesday we’ll
explore this further using Mathematica.
4. Read [Road, Ch. 4 (pp. 71–85)]. This will serve as an introduction to
complex numbers. You may want to compare with the treatments in
[What, 2.5.1–3 (pp. 88–103)] and [Tale, 3.1 (pp. 48–60)].
7 Thursday 28 March
At the X-hour today we worked on basic Mathematica programming, specif-
ically recursive programming, starting with summing the entries in a list,
reversing a list, and building up to writing our own gcd program to duplicate
the functionality of Mathematica’s builtin GCD program. I plan to go over
this at the beginning of class tomorrow. In preparation, please look over
the following Mathematica notebook and make sure you understand what is
going on:
http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/ doyle/docs/17.2013/GCD.nb
Here’s a pdf version:
http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/ doyle/docs/17.2013/GCD.pdf
8 Monday 1 April
Notebook showing powers of a complex number:
http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/ doyle/docs/17.2013/pow.nb
Notebook showing recursive definitions of plus, times, and power:
http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/ doyle/docs/17.2013/peano.nb
8.1 Assignment to work on for Friday 5 April
Investigate the following using Mathematica.
1. Plot the 100th-degree Taylor approximation to the sine function. How
far out does the agreement with sine extend? Explain.
2. Draw the tesselation illustrating the proof of the Pythagorean theorem,
as in Figure 2.3 of Road. (Don’t worry about the labels or how far the
tesselation extends.)
3. Using recursion, write functions to:
• Find the length of a list.
• Add the integers in a list.
• Multiply the integers in a list.
• Tell if a given integer occurs in a list.
• Replace all occurrences of a with b in a given list.
• Count the open braces in a nested list.
• Generate the list representing a given integer n, as on page 64 of
Road, namely 0 = {}, 1 = {0} = {{}}, 2 = {0, 1} = {{}, {{}}}, . . ..
4. What fraction of the integers from 1 to 10k are square-free for k =
1, . . . , 6? What is the limiting density of square-free integers? What
about cube-free integers?
5. Plot the Gaussian primes (some of them).
6. Rewrite the gcd function so as to use subtraction rather than Mod.
7. Rewrite the gcd function to return (x, y) such that xa + yb = gcd(a, b).
8. Rewrite the gcd function to work with Gaussian integers, and return
x, y such that xa + yb = gcd(a, b).
9. Write a function to factor a given rational prime p into Gaussian primes.
9 Wednesday 3 April: Assignment for Mon-
day 8 April
Prepare to turn in solutions to problems 1–5 above on Monday 8 April.
On Thursday 4 April we’ll meet in the X-hour to continue work on these
problems.
There will be no class on Friday 5 April.
10 Why i?
Let z be a function of t, and suppose that z(t) 6= 0, so we can write
z 0 = az.
To see how fast |z| is changing, we compute
d 2
|z| = (z z̄)0 = z 0 z̄ + z z̄ 0 = z 0 z̄ + z z¯0 = (a + ā)z z̄ = 2<(a)|z|2 .
dz
So, to keep |z| constant, we must make a purely imaginary.
If z(t) = exp(it) we have z 0 = iz so a = i, and since z(0) = 1, exp(it)
remains on the unit circle for all t. This goes a long way toward explaining
Euler’s formula
exp(it) = cos t + i sin t.
Now let’s look at the Schroedinger equation . . .
