Weird Math sets out to “reveal the strange connections between math and everyday life.” The book fulfills that laudable goal, in part. At times, teenage math prodigy Agnijo Banerjee and his tutor, ...

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 ...

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 ...

New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.” In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, ...

Masaki Kashiwara received the honor, often regarded as the Nobel Prize in mathematics, for work that combined different mathematical fields to solve challenging problems. By Kenneth Chang Masaki ...

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 spite of their name, “imaginary” numbers are as real as any other numbers, especially when it comes to hunting for lost treasure. For our first Insights puzzle of 2019, let’s go on a treasure hunt.