Yasmeen Namazie (’15Mr. Endlos & the Imaginary Number

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

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particularly slow rate of .167 students/sec, he thought), Mr. Endlos sat at his big, mahogany desk, whose top had an impressive surface area of 8.34 feet^2, watching them discuss twitting and the instagrand, or whatever other meaningless riff-raff they went on about. “Today, children, we are going to discuss radicals and taking square roots,” he began. He turned around and scrawled in oversized chicken scratches on the whiteboard. The school had just made the transition from blackboards to whiteboards, and he despised the way the markers glided across the glossy surface without making a sound. It made him feel like what he was teaching didn’t have substance; the etching on the chalkboard made the information inherently true. “Mr. Endlos, can you take the square root of a negative number?” Tommy Harris interrupted from the front row. Mr. Endlos brought the marker to a halt. He let out an exasperated sigh; “Yes, Mr. Harris. We call this an Imaginary Number. But it is an irrational concept, utterly and completely irrational. You might as well disregard it — the imaginary can never be real.” he said, turning 180º to face the future nine-to-fives staring at him with their lifeless, post-lunch eyes. But once he turned, he noticed that the students had vanished, and instead there was a man in a long, cylindrical top hat standing in the center of square room. He stood with his feet at an obtuse angle, and his hands clasped at the midpoint of his waist. “Am i not real, good sir?” he said. “Do i not stand before you, in the flesh?” Mr. Endlos was aghast. He opened his mouth wide enough to swallow an exponential function, but not a sound escaped from the dark matter in his throat. “Without i, your world would be inherently skewed. You could divide by zero, 1 would equal 2, numbers would be meaningless.

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Could you, of all people, understand and perceive the world without numbers?” the man questioned. “But… but, but.. numbers are rational,” Mr. Endlos stuttered frantically. “i can’t exist! i doesn’t exist! It’s… it’s mathematical nonsense! Imaginary! Irrational!” he cried. “i is imaginary, i is real. i is tangible, i is surreal,” the man began chanting. Slowly, one by one, each desk melted into the floor and dispersed like liquid over the tiles. The structure shook at an inconceivable magnitude as a distant rumbling roared in the distance until all Mr. Endlos could here was the piercing scream of silence. Pencils, staplers, calculators, posters — everything was melting. Solid became liquid, liquid became gas. Mr. Endlos covered his ears fiercely and shut his eyes. “i isn’t real! i can’t be real!” he shouted as he fell to his knees. The man stood composed in the center of the room as the chaos unfolded and objects melted around him. “i am real,” the man affirmed calmly. “i shall show you what happens if i didn’t exist.” The man tipped his hat and melted into the floor. Suddenly, the rumbling tremors stopped. Mr. Endlos opened his eyes and saw Nothing. It was a white void, free space, an endless plane. He stood up at gazed at the expanse of Nothing, blinded by the white. His steps made no sound. “There’s nothing here!” Mr. Endlos cried. “Help! Help!” “Precisely,” i said.

Yasmeen Namazie (’15)

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