To a nonmathematician, having the letter “i” represent a number that does not quite exist and is “imaginary” can be hard to wrap your head around. If you open your mind to this way of thinking, ...

Mona Lisa’s smile. Mary Lou Retton’s Olympic vault. Mariah Carey’s musical pitch. All are considered perfect. So are the numbers 6 and 28. With feats of artistry and athleticism, perfection lies in ...

Physicists construct theories to describe nature. Let us explain it through an analogy with something that we can do in our everyday life, like going on a hike in the mountains. To avoid getting lost, ...

Mathematicians were disturbed, centuries ago, to find that calculating the properties of certain curves demanded the seemingly impossible: numbers that, when multiplied by themselves, turn negative.

If you’ve ever taken an algebra or physics class, then you’ve met a parabola, the simple curve that can model how a ball flies through the air. The most important part of a parabola is the vertex — ...

Imaginary numbers are necessary to accurately describe reality, two new studies have suggested. Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have ...

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 ...

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 ...