Our February Insights puzzle sent readers on a treasure hunt based on complex numbers. First we provided a bit of a primer, demonstrating that complex numbers (expressions of the form a + bi, where ...

Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool for carrying out complex calculations. If you work on Excel, then you might come across performing mathematical operations almost every day. Sometimes, we face ...

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 ...

The square root of a negative number could easily be regarded as a curious mathematical construction that has little bearing on real life. Indeed, the French polymath René Descartes gave such numbers ...

Real and imaginary: The time-dependent Schrödinger equation formulated using complex numbers. (Courtesy: iStock/piranka) Complex numbers are essential to achieve the most accurate quantum-mechanical ...