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 ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when the ...

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 ...

Somewhere at the edge of mathematics lurks a number so large that it breaks the very foundations of our understanding - and ...

You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. Follow Andy Kiersz Every time Andy publishes a story, you’ll get ...

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 ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Originally defined as the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, pi — ...