>>13686197Here's the tricky thing: what you need, in order to really understand a mathematical concept, is an intuitive understanding of the underlying relationship; but that can neither be gained by starting from purely abstract definitions, nor by becoming attached to concrete examples of the relationship. Think of how a child learns what '3' is: you can show him three chairs and say "three chairs", then you show him three apples and you say "three apples", then you show him three birds, and you say "three birds", etc., until the child undertands what the "three" is, even though it refers to nothing tangible you really point to. You can understand complex numbers by thinking of them as vectors on the complex plane, and operations with complex numbers in terms of scaling and rotation, but the cruicial point is to see how operations on complex numbers relate to operations on real numbers, in terms of what laws they abide by in both cases, and then you get a sense of those operations as something more abstract.
