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 ...

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 ...

William Ross does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

Somewhere around middle school, you learned about squaring numbers and the inverse, finding the square root of a number, but a little reminder can't hurt. You square a number when you multiply it by ...