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 ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

If all you had at your mathematical disposal was the idea of real numbers, you could still get very far. From Galileo to Newton to Coulomb to Maxwell, the entirety of classical physics is built on the ...

(via Sabine Hossenfelder) Complex numbers are created when you add a real number and an imaginary number (like “i”). These numbers are used throughout math and physics, notably in the Schrödinger ...

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 ...

The Royal Irish Academy, the academy for the sciences and humanities for the whole of Ireland will vigorously promote excellence in scholarship, recognise achievements in learning, direct research ...