The techniques he developed in the field of complex numbers have found use in tackling a wide range of fundamental equations in physics. By Kenneth Chang Joseph J. Kohn, who played a key role in ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Calculus is a powerful mathematical tool. But for hundreds of years after its invention in the 17th century, it stood on a shaky ...

In the late 19th century, Karl Weierstrass invented a fractal-like function that was decried as nothing less than a “deplorable evil.” In time, it would transform the foundations of mathematics.

Real and complex functions both arise from the fundamental idea of mapping points in a domain to real or complex values, yet their theories display distinctive features. Real functions—mappings ...