The square root of a negative number could easily be regarded as a curious mathematical construction that has little bearing on real life. Indeed, the French polymath René Descartes gave such numbers ...

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 ...

New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.” In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, ...