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 ...

Real and imaginary: The time-dependent Schrödinger equation formulated using complex numbers. (Courtesy: iStock/piranka) Complex numbers are essential to achieve the most accurate quantum-mechanical ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

Extracting useful information from large data sets can be a daunting task. Topological methods for analysing data sets provide a powerful technique for extracting such information. Persistent homology ...

In spite of their name, “imaginary” numbers are as real as any other numbers, especially when it comes to hunting for lost treasure. For our first Insights puzzle of 2019, let’s go on a treasure hunt.

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 ...

In a previous post, I argued that concepts and concerns, such as free will and determinism, can be complex in the same sense in which numbers can be: in other words, in combining a real with an ...

We’re going to take a look at how computers use a stream of 1s and 0s to represent data. Today, we’re going to take a look at how computers use a stream of 1s and 0s to represent all of our data - ...