It turns out that imaginary numbers aren’t really needed for quantum mechanics.

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, ...

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.

Physicists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have examined a fundamental property of quantum mechanics in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). In an article published in ...

For almost a century, physicists have been intrigued by the fundamental question: why are complex numbers so important in quantum mechanics, that is, numbers containing a component with the imaginary ...

Earlier this year, news broke that an OpenAI AI had solved one of the difficult problems in mathematics, the 'Navier-Stokes ...

If you have ever read advanced textbooks or papers about electronics, you may have been surprised to see the use of complex numbers used in the analysis of AC circuits. A complex number has two parts: ...

I wanted to know what the imaginary number waveform mentioned in Sanshu-san's story was, so I decided to have him teach me ...

An international team of researchers shows through a concrete theoretical experiment that the prediction by standard complex quantum theory cannot be expressed by its real counterpart and ratifies its ...

Explanatory diagram for the research question—is quantum mechanics possible with only real numbers?—and results of the study. Credit: Pedro Barrios Hita, HHU Physicists from Heinrich Heine University ...