Now, on to the subject of complex numbers. We have stayed away from this subject until now simply because we did not want to confuse things. Initially, it is easy to think of signals as “real valued.” ...

Margot, a zoo veterinary technician writes, "In reading Charles Seife’s fabulous book Zero, he presents a graph of complex numbers which plot a changing exponent for the basic formula (X+iY)n in which ...

Complex numbers seem to have an almost mystical aura surrounding them. Perhaps it’s because of the terminology used for them – for example, they have a ‘real part’ and an ‘imaginary part’, and they ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...