Talk:Imaginary number

This article was originally a redirecty to complex number, but has been replaced by a brief explanation of the terminology and a link to that article to avoid confusion. Greg Woodhouse 10:34, 16 April 2007 (CDT)

Confusing sentence

I don't understand the sentence

Sometimes such complex numbers are called "pure imaginary numbers" to distinguish them from other complex numbers that are not real.

It's not very clear what the antecedent of "such complex numbers" is; I assumed it is "a complex number whose real part is zero" and fixed the sequence accordingly. More importantly, the way I read the sentence, it says that such complex numbers are called "pure imaginary numbers" because in that way, they are are distinguished from other complex numbers. But that seems a rather odd reason; you could just as well call them simply "imaginary numbers". -- Jitse Niesen 07:59, 17 April 2007 (CDT)