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, ...

You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an everyday problem, such as calculating a tip at a restaurant or determining the square footage of a room. But what role does math play ...

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 ...

The [Math Sorcerer] loves books. His latest acquisition is the famous Real and Complex Analysis, which is a very stout math book. How stout? Well, there are several chapters on holomorphic functions, ...

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.

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 ...