It was a full packed house as usual and some of them appeared to me as though they have not been able to come out of my 1+1 (reference: my previous blog) shock and I knew I had to ease out the day long gap. Good morning has never been a successful phrase in front of this grown up international group!
“Flop indeed”? My mind silently screamed.
To make things more worse, I announced that the topic for the day would be complex number ‘i’, a topic which caused otherwise looking mathematicians more extroverts, conventional tool engineers real bookworms and the high voltage and low voltage groups reclusive. I was standing in front of a non reclusive cohort and I knew I had to be extremely careful not to be sounding like a learnt professional but like a sweetly paced kindergarten story teller.
Once upon a time there lived a magnet, which when freely suspended in air slept North South. Like a flower has its fragrance that attracts beauties around, this magnet had a fascinating field spread around which attracted all the iron like beauties as close as possible. The magnet was very well looked after by an eminent person named Michael Faraday. Faraday carried the magnet with him wherever he went. It was time for Faraday to find a suitable match for the magnet and the search was over when a naked coil triggered Faraday’s imagination. He decided to unite the magnet and coil.
An interval was on the cards and I decided to do my part. My compass movements uplifted their spirits and I noticed people becoming more inquisitive. My not so exquisite picturesque view of the arrangement was good enough for my energetic audience to visualize the coil movement pattern and they strongly believed that something was indeed destined to happen!
They badly wanted the next half of the story!
Rate of change was a new feeling for them and I had to be careful fore playing it with. The sequel story, for the rate at which this field interacts with the moving coil (I had to be careful and did not use the word cutting) will possibly generate a rate of change of the field, was just fine as they knew that the fragrance did have a variation as they went near to the flower and vice versa.
The stage was set for a final showdown.
Fortunately they knew how trigonometric functions would look like when sketched! The moving coil and the unseen field (for this case) hence interacted and the rate of change of magnetic flux (field) threading the coil or the rate at which magnetic flux (field) is cut for a wire-moving across magnetic field lines resulted in the origin of Faraday’s law. An induced voltage was the result whose magnitude did relate to the time derivative of the magnetic field. People realized that Faraday did the right thing by setting up a marriage between the magnet and coil which gave birth to an extremely useful product.
Is there an inexplicable storyline for the complex number? People were curious though!
The baby needed a name, “Induced voltage”. Issue Solved!
A “surname” was also needed though. It requires some meaningful introspection and the best thing was to have the surname from the combination of factors involved. The involved factors were the time derivatives and the sinusoid. Time derivative of a sinusoid provides cosine. The family was proud enough not to loose the generality and they wanted a surname relating to sine itself
“Ladies and Gentlemen, there goes i”, I was elated and I felt as if I had experienced a kundalini energy. This was one of the reasons for the origin of the operator j or i which is called the complex number.
Both I and ‘i’ have indeed been complex.
As expected, half the class was absent on the following day!
This is not a real incident though!
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