Re: creating Inf*i

[A S Hodel]

I'd be curious what the IEEE standard for this kind of operation 
specifies.  If you view the complex plane as an honest-to-goodness 
plane, then what you're saying makes sense.  If, on the other hand, you 
view it as the Riemann sphere, then "all roads lead to infinity" - and 
there's only one infinity, at the top of the sphere. This latter 
viewpoint is how one has to interpret a number of control-theoretic 
results in complex analysis.

As a result, there may be some ambiguity of what i*inf returns - 
although, like you, I'd like to see it be 0 + i*inf.

On Monday, May 12, 2003, at 04:05 AM, withaar wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I need to create an imaginary infinity number. These methods don't 
> work:
>
> a = complex(0,Inf)
> a = 1i*Inf
>
> Both methods multiply (0+i)*Inf and the result is NaN+Infi because 
> 0*Inf
> is undefined. This, however, works:
>
> a = (1i*realmax)*2
>
> Is there a better way to do this?
>
>
> cheers,
>
> Willem
>
>
>
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