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.” ...

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 ...

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 ...

In this video series I show you how to write complex numbers in standard form. We use the idea of imaginary numbers to higher powers to simplify and then write the expression in complex number form.

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 ...

A Chinese migrant worker with no college degree has found a solution to a complex math problem – in what appears to be a real life version of the Oscar-winning movie “Good Will Hunting.” Yu Jianchun, ...

A mathematics professor says Yu Jianchun, a 33-year-old package delivery man who has never taken advanced math classes, has ‘an instinct and an extreme sensitivity to numbers’ You can save this ...

The world belongs to the mathematicians and the physicists. We lay people may pump our minds with Discovery Channel specials, but they’re the ones who get to understand how it all really works–how the ...