In 2020 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 that I ...

Imaginary numbers might seem like unicorns and goblins — interesting but irrelevant to reality. But for describing matter at its roots, imaginary numbers turn out to be essential. They seem to be ...

Fractal geometry offers a rigorous framework for describing irregular and self-similar structures that are ubiquitous across nature and technology. This field has profoundly influenced our ...

Mathematicians were disturbed, centuries ago, to find that calculating the properties of certain curves demanded the seemingly impossible: numbers that, when multiplied by themselves, turn negative.

Numbers provide literal or scalar storage and direct access. A number is also an immutable type, meaning that changing or updating its value results in a newly allocated object. This activity is, of ...

Imaginary numbers might seem like unicorns and goblins — interesting but irrelevant to reality. But for describing matter at its roots, imaginary numbers turn out to be essential. They seem to be ...