Weird Math sets out to “reveal the strange connections between math and everyday life.” The book fulfills that laudable goal, in part. At times, teenage math prodigy Agnijo Banerjee and his tutor, ...

This series is excerpted from “Digital Signal Processing: Instant Access.” Order this book today and receive an additional 20% discount. Click here www.elsevierdirect.com and be sure to type in 92836.

Our February Insights puzzle sent readers on a treasure hunt based on complex numbers. First we provided a bit of a primer, demonstrating that complex numbers (expressions of the form a + bi, where ...

Have you ever sat in a math classroom and wondered, “When will I ever use this?” You might have asked yourself this question when you first encountered “imaginary” numbers, and with good reason: What ...

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 ...

I. There should actually be a lot of algebra in this book, much more than I have been able to present. My focus has been on Bernhard Riemann and his work on prime numbers and the zeta function. That ...

Complex numbers seem to have an almost mystical aura surrounding them. Perhaps it’s because of the terminology used for them – for example, they have a ‘real part’ and an ‘imaginary part’, and they ...