Efficient division in the binary representation of complex numbers

Computer operations involving complex numbers, essential in such applications as digital signal processing and image processing, are usually performed in a "divide-and-conquer" approach dealing separately with the real and imaginary parts and then accumulating the results. There have been several proposals to treat complex numbers as a single unit but all seem to have floundered on the basic problem of the division process without which, of course, it is impossible to carry out all but the most basic arithmetic. This paper resurrects an early proposal to express complex numbers in a single "binary" representation and provides a fail-safe procedure for obtaining the quotient of two complex numbers expressed in this representation.