Complex numbers seem to have an almost mystical aura surrounding them. Perhaps it’s because of the terminology used for them – for example, they have a ‘real part’ and an ‘imaginary part’, and they ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Imaginary numbers push the boundaries of calculus and other branches of math. Hill Street Studios/DigitalVision via Getty Images ...

The world of math is complex … in more ways than one. Sure, it’s full of complex ideas that are all tied up and packaged within beautiful and often times complex wrapping paper that is adorned with ...

Several years ago one of us, Toni, asked another of us, Marco, to come to his office at the Institute of Photonic Sciences, a large research center in Castelldefels near Barcelona. “There is a problem ...

If all you had at your mathematical disposal was the idea of real numbers, you could still get very far. From Galileo to Newton to Coulomb to Maxwell, the entirety of classical physics is built on the ...

An international team of researchers shows through a concrete theoretical experiment that the prediction by standard complex quantum theory cannot be expressed by its real counterpart and ratifies its ...

Think back to elementary school during which you learned about a seemingly useless mathematical relic called prime numbers. Your teacher told you in class one day that they are special numbers, ...