Graphing complex functions

[ibjazzo]

hey there!

 

I'm doing my IA on complex numbers and it involves complex numbers with a variable x. I was thinking that it would be good to give my results on a real-imaginary plane which would show how the values change when x changes. Does anyone know whether there's a software which could help me do this. I have geogebra but I am only able to illustrate single points with it and that is not too helpful..

[Dwight K Shrute]

If you have access to Matlab I would really recommend it. It can take sometime to learn how to use it but it's very useful. You could also try Gnuplot, I haven't used it so I can't tell you if and how it works but I'm guessing it's possible. Maybe http://wiki.geogebra.org/en/Complex_Numbers can be of use as well. 

[Vioh]

I have to say that this is really not an easy job to do, because this requires constructing a 3D-graph as you need to have 3 different axes (one for Real part, one for Imaginary part, and the last one for the variable 'x'). However, it is still possible to do it using Matlab (as mentioned by Dwight K Shrute). Another alternative is to use the 3D-version of geogebra (I think they call it GeoGebra version 5 beta). In general, just search for how to draw 3D-graphs using Matlab/geogebra on google, and you'll get tonnes of useful results.

 

If somehow you couldn't get it to work, an alternative can be to construct 2 independent graphs to see how the Real part & the Imaginary part change with 'x' independently from one another. That would suffice the criteria I think. Good luck!