Normally, complex numbers are plotted on a 2d plane where real numbers are the x coordinate and imaginary numbers are the y coordinate. I'd like to plot complex numbers in such a way that I can represent it in one dimension.
Sure, I could plot the complex number(s) in a 2d-plane, take cross-sections of it, and line them up, but that isn't very "mathematical" and it loses a lot of beauty that many images on the complex plane have (hint: fractals).
I was wondering if there were any methods of plotting numbers on the complex plane. Maybe using imaginary numbers to determine spacing between real numbers, or using some other algorithm to combine the real and imaginary numbers and listing that. I'd like to find something that isn't just listing the real and imaginary values together on a number line, but something that actually preserves the beauty of arrangements in the complex plane in a one-dimensional environment. This question could also be more generally taken as "how to plot 2d coordinates in one-dimension" if that solves the problem.
Update:
I ended up using a hilbert curve to travel through the points. This wasn't the "mathematical" approach I'd originally hoped for, but it worked for my purposes.
Plotting complex numbers on a number line(or indeed any set on a line) gives us a total ordering, and vice versa. Now, to have this plot maintain nice properties translates into nice properties of this total ordering. In particular, we of course want to be able to shift on this number line. In addition, many of the fractal pictures come about because of the properties of complex multiplication, so we will want to preserve some information about complex multiplication as well.
To see that this cannot happen, see Total ordering on complex numbers