While moving my laptop the other day, I ended up mashing the keyboard a little, and by pure chance managed to do a google search for i!.
Curiously, Google's calculator dutifully informed me that $i!$ was, in fact, $0.498015668 – 0.154949828i$.
Why is this?
I know what a factorial is, so what does it actually mean to take the factorial of a complex number? Also, are those parts of the complex answer rational or irrational? Do complex factorials give rise to any interesting geometric shapes/curves on the complex plane?
Best Answer
It is sort of an abuse of what is meant by factorial. The usual definition of $$n! = \prod_{k=1}^n k$$ obviously cannot apply because you can sit and count integers until the end of time and beyond and you'll never find $i$.
However, we can generalise what we mean by factorial by using a property of the gamma function, which is defined to be $$\Gamma(z) = \int_0^{\infty} e^{-t}t^{z-1}\, dt$$ This has the useful property that, for any $n \in \mathbb{N}$, $$\Gamma(n) = (n-1)!$$ which has an easy proof by induction on $n$. It also has lots of nice analytical properties which make it a good choice for an extension of the factorial function.
Anyway, since the gamma function can be defined (after analytic continuation; see LVK's comment) on the entire complex plane, minus the non-positive integers, for a general $z \in \mathbb{C} - \{ -1, -2, \cdots \}$ we can put $$z! \overset{\text{def}}{=} \Gamma(z+1)$$ For this reason we get $$i! = \Gamma(i+1) = \int_0^{\infty} e^{-t}t^{i}\, dt \approx 0.498015668−0.154949828i$$
See also here and here.