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, ...

For the first time, researchers have seen how light behaves during a mysterious phenomenon called 'imaginary time'. When you shine light through almost any transparent material, the gridlock of ...

One of the weirdest theories in cosmology is the holographic principle, the idea that our universe is a three-dimensional image projected off a two-dimensional surface — the idea that, yes, we are ...

Imaginary numbers began as a desperate solution to equations that seemed unsolvable. In the 1500s, Italian mathematicians ...

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 since ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The world of mathematics is full of unreachable corners, where unsolvable problems live. Now, yet another has been exposed. In 1900, the ...

Many complicated advances in research mathematics are spurred by a desire to understand some of the simplest questions about numbers. How are prime numbers distributed in the integers? Are there ...

Robyn Arianrhod 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 ...

Let the viewer = x, David Colosi writes, introducing his gloriously dense and slyly comic “proof” of God’s manmade existence. Guided by Wittgenstein’s conjecture that one could construct serious ...