Caspar Wessel (1745-1818), a Norwegian, was the first one to obtain and publish a suitable
presentation of complex numbers. On march 10, 1797, Wessel presented his paper “On
the Analytic Representation of Direction: An Attempt” to the Royal Danish Academy
of Sciences. The paper was published in the Academy’s Memoires of 1799. Its quality
was judged to be so high that it was the first paper to be accepted for publication by a
non-member of the academy.