Now, on to the subject of complex numbers. We have stayed away from this subject until now simply because we did not want to confuse things. Initially, it is easy to think of signals as “real valued.” ...

Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial ...

In 1886 the mathematician Leopold Kronecker famously said, “God Himself made the whole numbers — everything else is the work of men.” Indeed, mathematicians have introduced new sets of numbers besides ...

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.