Automorphisms such as this are the 'fearless symmetries' of the title of Avner Ash and Robert Gross's book. They can be thought of as symmetries because they are transformations of a mathematical ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

The square root of a negative number could easily be regarded as a curious mathematical construction that has little bearing on real life. Indeed, the French polymath René Descartes gave such numbers ...