For many math fans, it doesn’t get much better than ... represent a square. (The square root of 1092025 is 1045). This year, there will be eight of them — more than any other year this century ...

I'm a mathematician who studies analysis: an area of math that deals with complex numbers. Unlike the more familiar real numbers—positive and negative integers, fractions, square roots ...

Then there was root-mean-square (RMS) voltage. For those nice sine waves, you took the peak voltage and divided by the square root of two, 1.414 or so. You know that kid in the front of the class?

Mathematicians once turned up their noses at imaginary numbers. But complex analysis actually simplifies math and physics.