“There are five fundamental operations in mathematics,” the German mathematician Martin Eichler supposedly said. “Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modular forms.” Part of the joke, ...

Using “refreshingly old” tools, mathematicians resolved a 50-year-old conjecture about how to categorize important functions called modular forms, with consequences for number theory and theoretical ...

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, ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...