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, ...

A new DNA computer calculates square roots of perfect squares up to 900. Like quantum computers, DNA computers are an exciting frontier of post-silicon computing. Where previous examples were up to 4 ...

The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But ...

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 ...

IN NATURE for June 19, Mr. John Wishart directs attention to certain inaccuracies of one unit in the last printed place in Barlow's Tables of the square roots of numbers. Such errors are very common ...