WILLIAMSTOWN -- William Wootters has a conundrum -- a mathematical conundrum. Wootters is a physics professor at Williams College, and on Thursday he's one of the presenters of the Williams Faculty ...

(THE CONVERSATION) 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 ...

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.

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 ...