Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 1 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2024 / Paper 1 / 11 / d

Write $z_j=x_j+i{y}_j$. Multiplication givesTherefore the real part is the dot product of the corresponding vectors:For nonzero vectors, this is $|z_1||z_2|\cos (\arg z_1-\arg z_2)$, measuring their alignment.

From the same multiplication, the imaginary part isHere the planar vectors are embedded in three dimensions with zero third coordinate. Its magnitude is the area of their parallelogram; its sign is positive when the oriented angle from ${\mathbf{v}}_2$ to ${\mathbf{v}}_1$ has positive sine. The reversed order matters: $\Im (z_1{z}_2^{\ast })$ is the negative of the usual signed area for the order $({\mathbf{v}}_1,{\mathbf{v}}_2)$.