Calvin Trillin’s most recent book is The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press. “Sir, as your political policy adviser, I have to say that the question of Canada –” “Our beautiful ...

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. This means they are made of both real numbers and the ...

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 ...

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 ...

The trick was to use what are called “complex numbers”, which have a “real” part and an “imaginary” part. The imaginary part is a multiple of the number i, “the square root of minus ...

Warning! This post contains spoilers for The Platform 2. Zamiatin keeps mentioning the mathematical imaginary number in The Platform 2, making it hard not to wonder what it means and how it ...

When you compose a document and need either a subscript or a superscript – the little numbers you put beside words to indicate a footnote or by numbers for exponents – Microsoft Word gives you ...

It should be impossible to measure an imaginary number in the lab, but a group of researchers have found a way to do so. They produced the equivalent of a magnetic field of imaginary strength ...

Looking for more episodes? Find them wherever you listen to podcasts. Ryan Knutson is the co-host of The Journal, The Wall Street Journal’s flagship daily podcast. He has worked at the Journal ...