Imaginary units were invented to answer the polynomial equation formula_2, which normally has no solution (see below). The term "imaginary" comes from by René Descartes and was meant to be insulting as, like zero and negative numbers at other times in history, imaginary numbers were thought to be useless as they are not natural. It wasn't until later centuries that the work of mathematicians like Leonhard Euler, Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Carl Friedrich Gauss would prove that imaginary numbers were very important for some areas of algebra.