An artificial intelligence created by the firm DeepMind has discovered a new way to multiply numbers, the first such advance in over 50 years. The find could boost some computation speeds by up to 20 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Imaginary numbers might seem like unicorns and goblins — interesting but irrelevant to reality. But for describing matter at its roots, imaginary numbers turn out to be essential. They seem to be ...

This summer, battle lines were drawn over a simple math problem: 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = ? If you divide 8 by 2 first, you get 16, but if you multiply 2 by (2 + 2) first, you get 1. So, which answer is right?

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 ...