I'll take a stab at this one; if I miss the mark, people, please chime in. What's "strange" here is not numpy's behavior but octave's (IMO). Remember that, over R, arctan is used in two different ways: one is simply as a map from (-inf, inf) -> (-pi/2,pi/2) - here, let's call that invtan; the other is as a means to determine "the angle" (conventionally taken to be between -pi and pi) of a point in the plane - but since, for example, tan(pi/4) = tan(-3pi/4) (and in general tan(x) = tan(x-pi)) to uniquely determine said angle, we need to keep track of and take into account the quadrant in which the point lies; this is (the only reason) why arctan2 is a function of two arguments, one representing the abscissa, the other the ordinate of the point. But when the argument is complex (arctan2, as the inverse of the tangent function, *is* a valid function on C), this geometric use no longer makes sense, so there's really no reason to implement arctan2(z,w), z, w complex. If for some reason, e.g., uniformity of algorithmic expression - I don't see any (simple) way to preserve uniformity of code expression - as near as I can tell, you're going to have to implement an if/else if you need to allow for the invtan of two complex arguments - you need to handle arctan2(z,w), implement it as arctan(w/z):
import numpy numpy.arctan(1j/1j) (0.78539816339744828+0j)
DG lorenzo bolla wrote:
Weird behaviour with arctan2(complex,complex). Take a look at this:
In [11]: numpy.arctan2(1.,1.) Out[11]: 0.785398163397
In [12]: numpy.arctan2(1j,1j) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- exceptions.AttributeError Traceback (most recent call last)
AttributeError: 'complex' object has no attribute 'arctan2'
same error for:
In [13]: numpy.arctan2(1j,1.) In [14]: numpy.arctan2(1.,1j)
But arctan2 is defined for complex arguments, as far as Octave knows :-) :
octave:7> atan2(1,1) ans = 0.78540 octave:8> atan2(1j,1j) ans = 0 octave:9> atan2(1j,1) ans = 0 octave:10> atan2(1,1j) ans = 1.5708
bug or wanted behaviour? Lorenzo. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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