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 ...

In a previous post, I argued that concepts and concerns, such as free will and determinism, can be complex in the same sense in which numbers can be: in other words, in combining a real with an ...

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 ...

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 ...

Repetition doesn’t always have to be humdrum. In mathematics, it is a powerful force, capable of generating bewildering complexity. Even after decades of study, mathematicians find themselves unable ...