Remark:
What does it mean to differentiate a complex function?
For the proof of this result, just check that the proof of
Proposition 4.8
works perfectly well for complex differentiation.
In view of the ideas we discussed above, Corollary 7.11 allows us to conclude:
Now we have a power series, which is perfectly well defined for all complex numbers, and we know that it agree with ex for all values x for which ex has so far been defined. We use this to now extend our definition of exponentiation to the whole complex plane:
The payoff from this extension of our definition, together with all that we know about power series (specifically Theorem 7.9) will be: