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, ...

You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an everyday problem, such as calculating a tip at a restaurant or determining the square footage of a room. But what role does math play ...

Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial ...

The [Math Sorcerer] loves books. His latest acquisition is the famous Real and Complex Analysis, which is a very stout math book. How stout? Well, there are several chapters on holomorphic functions, ...

Without qualification, the question of whether complex numbers are necessary for natural sciences, and, more concretely, for physics, must be answered in the negative: physics experiments are ...

New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.” In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, ...