Ana Caraiani and James Newton have extended an important result in number theory to the imaginary realm. The post Elliptic Curves Yield Their Secrets in a New Number System first appeared on Quanta Magazine
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 perfect cubes (like 8 = 23 or 27 = 33) that can be written as the sum of two other cubes? More generally, mathematicians might want to solve an equation. But it is often impossible to do so by tinkering…