Electrical j in complex numbers

Dear W3C friends,

I am a Electrical Engineering professor in the Politechnical University of
Catalonia (Spain) and the web-editor of our group.

I am very interested in web accessibility and, so, the MathML interested me.

In the MathML specification there are a lot of entity names but I think that
it was convenient to add one. So this is a recomendation, no an errata.

Electrical Engineering is one of the disciplines that uses complex numbers
widely. But in Electrical Engineering we use the lowercase leters to
indicate temporal functions. If I and U are current and voltage RMS values,
i and u are current and voltage temporal functions (sinusoids in case of
normal AC).

In order to avoid confussion, we don't use the leter i to indicate imaginary
components (and the square root of -1); in Electrical Engineering we use the
letter j (For example: A+jB or 34+j9).

If we are interested in write electrical expressions in MathML we must
indicate the imaginary part with a variable named j or use the mathematical
notation (with ⅈ or ⅈ) having the risk of misinterpretations
in visual rendering users.

I think that a good idea was to define an additional entity like
&ImaginaryJ; or &ij;.


Yours sincerely,

Dr. Oriol Boix Aragonès
Departament d'Enginyeria Elèctrica
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya



P.S. Sorry, my English is not well.

Received on Tuesday, 16 January 2001 14:58:07 UTC