Beautiful exposition. Even in the late 1700s, many mathematicians rejected the use of mere negative numbers, viewing them as anomalies which indicated that one had phrased a problem wrong to begin with. On the other hand, Euler understood everything very well and even calmly explained how to take logarithms of complex numbers, which bewildered most of his contemporaries.

Someone once said that a lot of confusion could have been avoided if, instead of the terms positive, negative, and imaginary, they had instead used the terms forward, backward, and lateral.