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.

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

It’s been 162 years since Bernhard Riemann posed a seminal question about the distribution of prime numbers. Despite their best efforts, mathematicians have made very little progress on the Riemann ...

Have you ever sat in a math classroom and wondered, “When will I ever use this?” You might have asked yourself this question when you first encountered “imaginary” numbers, and with good reason: What ...