It is a useful abstraction to think of the voltage going through the circuit as a complex value.

It always
has the same value of voltage, current, or power, however that value varies consistently between
real and imaginary. If you picture a plane, with real numbers on the horizontal axis, and imaginary
numbers on the vertical, the voltage (e.g.) can be represented as a point at a constant distance from
the origin, making a perfect circle around the origin once every cycle. The real value of the voltage
then appears to be a sine wave, the imaginary part is a cosine. Continuing this abstraction, we can
see that the point is actually moving a fixed number of radians per second; for instance a 1Hz signal

can be represented by a point moving about the origin in the complex plane at a rate of 6.28 ( )
radians per second. The angle in radians that the point makes with the positive real axis at any time

is represented in our calculations by the symbol , and the frequency is often expressed as
radians per second.