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, ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. An imaginary number is a number that, when squared, has a negative result. Essentially, an ...

In 2020 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 that I ...

Imaginary numbers might seem like unicorns and goblins — interesting but irrelevant to reality. But for describing matter at its roots, imaginary numbers turn out to be essential. They seem to be ...

It should be impossible to measure an imaginary number in the lab, but a group of researchers have found a way to do so. They produced the equivalent of a magnetic field of imaginary strength, meaning ...

The imaginary number takes mathematics to another dimension. If the square root of +1 is both +1 and -1, then what is the square root of -1? The imaginary number takes mathematics to another dimension ...

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss imaginary numbers - important mathematical phenomena which provide us with useful tools for understanding the world. Show more Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss ...