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, ...

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 ...

Like physics, math has its own set of “fundamental particles”—the prime numbers, which can’t be broken down into smaller natural numbers. They can only be divided by themselves and 1. And in a new ...