Looking at the complex map z -> z^2 with kids

Yesterday we did a fun project using Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s compex number video:

Sharing Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s Complex Number video with kids

The boys wanted to do a bit more work with complex numbers today, so I thought it would be fun to explore the map The computations for this mapping aren’t too difficult, so the kids can begin to see what’s going on with complex maps.

We started by looking at some of the simple properties. The kids had some good questions right from the start.

By the end of this video we’ve understood a bit about what happens to the real line.

After looking at the real line in the last video, we moved on to the imaginary axis in this video. The arithmetic was a little tricky for my younger son, so we worked slowly. By the end of this video we had a pretty good understand of what happens to the imaginary axis under the map

At the end of this video my younger son noted that we hadn’t found anything that goes to the imaginary axis. My older son had a neat idea after that!

Next we looked at . We found that it did go to the imaginary axis and then we found two nice generalizations that should a bunch of numbers that map to the imaginary axis.

Finally, we went to Mathematica to look at what happens to other lines. I fear that my attempts to make this part look better on camera may have actually made it look worse! But, at least the graphs show up reasonably well.

It was fun to hear what the boys thought they’d see here versus their surprise at what the actually saw 🙂

I think this is a pretty fun project for kids. There are lots of different directions we could go. They also get some good algebra / arithmetic practice working through the ideas.