[quote=@whizzball1]
<Snipped quote by Etcetera>

"Many other mathematicians were slow to adopt the use of imaginary numbers, including René Descartes, who wrote about them in his La Géométrie, where the term imaginary was used and meant to be derogatory."

They don't exist in real life, but in the realm of mathematics, they exist just as much as anything infinite or negative or irrational does. Negative numbers don't exist in real life. You can't have less than nothing. You can't have an irrational number of anything.
[/quote]

Just to top it off, 0 is both real and imaginary.