To a nonmathematician, having the letter "i" represent a number that does not quite exist and is "imaginary" can be hard to ...

As mathematicians Roger Cotes, René Descartes – who coined the term “imaginary number” – and others have observed, complex numbers make seemingly impossible integrals easy to solve and ...

cube roots and even numbers such as pi—complex numbers have an imaginary component. This means they are made of both real numbers and the imaginary number i: the square root of negative 1.

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. If you open your mind to this way of thinking, ...