Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Imaginary numbers push the boundaries of calculus and other branches of math. Hill Street Studios/DigitalVision via Getty Images ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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, ...

§2.1 FROM EGYPT TO EGYPT: Diophantus, 15 the father of algebra, in whose honor I have named this chapter, lived in Alexandria, in Roman Egypt, in either the 1st, the 2nd, or the 3rd century CE. I ...

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 ...