Plimpton 322, the tablet in question, is certainly an alluring artifact. It’s a broken piece of clay roughly the size of a postcard. It was filled with four columns of cuneiform numbers around 1800 ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American On Monday, the Onion reported that the ...

Now, on to the subject of complex numbers. We have stayed away from this subject until now simply because we did not want to confuse things. Initially, it is easy to think of signals as “real valued.” ...

This course will introduce you to the theory of functions of complex variables, which is a core area of mathematics. It is a basic tool in many mathematical theories. We will cover complex numbers and ...

For almost a century, physicists have been intrigued by the fundamental question: why are complex numbers so important in quantum mechanics, that is, numbers containing a component with the imaginary ...

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.

Complex numbers are numbers that consist of two parts — a real number and an imaginary number. Complex numbers are the building blocks of more intricate math, such as algebra. They can be applied to ...

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 ...