Once you have the idea of roots, the problem of what happens when you try to find an even root of a negative number immediately falls out.
The idea that you can add up an infinite number of infinitely small things and get a finite result is totally weird and counterintuitive and it takes a Newton or a Leibniz to come up with it in the first place.
SMTPA t1_j5zd0zw wrote
Reply to Historical mathematicians must have been quite impractical by nature since they discovered complex numbers before calculus. by Shamon_Yu
Once you have the idea of roots, the problem of what happens when you try to find an even root of a negative number immediately falls out.
The idea that you can add up an infinite number of infinitely small things and get a finite result is totally weird and counterintuitive and it takes a Newton or a Leibniz to come up with it in the first place.