Mr. Endlos and the Imaginary Number
Room 010 was one door down from Room 011, 14 paces from the library and 21 square tiles from the break room – well, at least that was how Mr. Endlos perceived it. Not many shared his fascination with numbers, for he was a pompously stingy man. He had a mustache like a negative parabola, dark pupils dilated with area 2π mm^2, and grey hair finer than a delicately penciled integral. He always laid 3 leafs of college-ruled paper on his desk because 4 was too masculine and 2 was too feminine. Mr. Endlos hated everything that strayed from exactitude, any prospect intangible or unquantifiable. For him, math was concrete, and numbers were truth. The concept of infinity was baffling and asymptotes made him cringe. This was a curious predicament for a shrewd, middle school math teacher like Mr. Endlos.“Irrational!” he would sneer when students would ask him about these mathematical uncertainties, “Utterly and completely irrational.” However, there was no mathematical absurdity for Mr. Endlos like the Imaginary Number, i. i = √(-1) One day, Mr. Endlos was preparing an assignment for his 7th grade Algebra class when he flipped to the section in the textbook dedicated to complex numbers. He came upon a particularly infuriating theorem: “...by simply accepting that i exists, we can solve things that need the square root of a negative number.” “Irrational!” he crowed. “Utterly and completely irrational… The square root of a negative number is inconceivable! How in the mathematical world could something imaginary be considered real?!” As the 20.5 students (not all of them could really be called “students”) began to trickle in at the start of 5th period Algebra (at a 6 Pillars of Salt
