Malcontent Wes popped into the comments of our recent post on the mathematical improbability of vampires with a link to a blog post with a great math-vampire analogy: vampires are the imaginary ...

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 ...

Our February Insights puzzle sent readers on a treasure hunt based on complex numbers. First we provided a bit of a primer, demonstrating that complex numbers (expressions of the form a + bi, where ...

All non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have real part one-half. Unfortunately, all those negative even numbers are trivial zeros. So … where are these non-trivial ones? To answer that, I must take ...

Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. §I.1 THIS BOOK IS A HISTORY OF ALGEBRA, written for the curious nonmathematician. It ...

If you have ever read advanced textbooks or papers about electronics, you may have been surprised to see the use of complex numbers used in the analysis of AC circuits. A complex number has two parts: ...