Imaginary Exponents

We may define imaginary exponents the same way that all sufficiently smooth real-valued functions of a real variable are generalized to the complex case--using Taylor series. A Taylor series expansion is just a polynomial (possibly of infinitely high order), and polynomials involve only addition, multiplication, and division. Since these elementary operations are also defined for complex numbers, any smooth function of a real variable may be generalized to a function of a complex variable by simply substituting the complex variable for the real variable in the Taylor series expansion of .

Let , where is any positive real number and is real. The Taylor series expansion about (``Maclaurin series''), generalized to the complex case is then

This is well defined, provided the series converges for every finite (see Problem 8). We have , so the first term is no problem. But what is ? In other words, what is the derivative of at ? Once we find the successive derivatives of at , we will have the definition of for any complex .

---

Order a Hardcopy of Mathematics of the DFT

Previous: A First Look at Taylor Series
Next: Derivatives of f(x)=a^x

---

written by Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.