Malcontent Wes popped into the comments of our recent post on the mathematical improbability of vampires with a link to a blog post with a great math-vampire analogy: vampires are the imaginary ...

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.

All kinds of parameters can be described using complex numbers of the form real + j * imaginary. The numerical values of real and imaginary can vary over very wide ranges. Trying to graph them ...