Solving equations often involves taking square roots of numbers and if you're not careful you might accidentally take a square root of something that's negative. That isn't allowed of course, but if you hold your breath and just carry on, then you might eventually square the illegal entity again and end up with a negative number that's a perfectly valid solution to your equation.

People first noticed this fact in the 15th century. A lot later on, in the 19th century, William Rowan Hamilton noticed that the illegal numbers you come across in this way can always be written as where and are ordinary numbers and stands for the square root of The number itself can be represented in this way with and Numbers of this form are called complex numbers.

You can add two complex numbers like this:

And you multiply them like this:

The complex number 1+2i.

But how can we visualise these numbers and their addition and multiplication? The and components are normal numbers so we can associate to them the point with coordinates on the plane, which is where you get to if you walk a distance in the horizontal direction and a distance in the vertical direction. So the complex number which is the sum of and corresponds to the point you get to by walking a distance in the horizontal direction and a distance in the vertical direction. Makes sense.

What about multiplication? Think of the numbers that lie on your horizontal axis with coordinates Multiplying them by flips them over to the other side of the point : goes to goes to and so on. In fact, you can think of multiplication by as a rotation: you rotate the whole plane through 180 degrees about the point

Multiplying by i.

What about multiplication by the square root of ? Multiplying twice by is the same as multiplying by So if the latter corresponds to a rotation through 180 degrees, the former should correspond to rotation by 90 degrees. And this works. Try multiplying any complex number, say by and you will see that the result corresponds to the point you get to by rotating through 90 degrees (counter-clockwise) about

And what about multiplying not just by but by a more difficult complex number Well, multiplying by an ordinary positive number corresponds to stretching or shrinking the plane: multiplication by 2 takes a point to which is further away from (that’s stretching) and multiplication by 1/2 takes it to which is closer to (shrinking).

Multiplying by 2 is stretching.

It turns out that multiplication by a complex number corresponds to a combination of rotation and shrinking/stretching. For example, multiplication by is rotation through 120 degrees followed by stretching by a factor of 2. So complex numbers are not just weird figments of the imagination designed to help you solve equations, they’ve got a geometric existence in their own right.

You can find out more about complex numbers and things you can do with them in the Plus articles Curious quaternions, Unveiling the Mandelbrot set, Non-Euclidean geometry and Indra's pearls and Maths goes to the movies.

Science advisors to government are an embattled lot. Remember the l'Aquila earthquake debacle or David Nutt's stance on drugs that cost him his job. Bridging the gap between politics and science isn't easy. Politicians like clear messages but science, and the reality it tries to describe, is rarely clear-cut.

Full marks for Obama.

So how do you advise a politician about science, its uncertainties and about risk? What better person to ask than John P. Holdren, Assistant to President Obama for Science and Technology. As he told a packed auditorium at the annual AAAS meeting in Boston, Holdren is actually quite happy with his own boss. Obama, he says, always wants to know the level of confidence scientists have in a specific result. And Holdren's first memo for Obama, which stuck to the traditional two pages, came back with "where's the rest?" scrawled over it. That's reassuring! Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Advisor to the European Commission, on the other hand, has come across leading European politicians who prefer to do without science advisors altogether, since "scientists never agree".

Glover says that it's important to emphasise consent rather than disagreement. Scientists may be unsure or disagree about the details of something, say the exact relationship between CO₂ emissions and global climate, but they may be certain about the big picture — that climate change is happening. Holdren points out that it's important to know where uncertainties are coming from — can they be sorted out with a bit more time and effort, or are they down to deeper gaps in or understanding or to processes we just can't pin down with better accuracy. Advisors should make sure uncertainties aren't exaggerated or understated, or simply ignored because they are too difficult to deal with.

Both Glover and Holdren agree that it's important to speak plainly to politicians. Advisors should use examples and visualisations of uncertainties (see this Plus article for some ideas) and when there's a range of possible outcomes of something, say an epidemic, use scenarios to examine the possibilities. Holdren advises to look for a policy that remains robust in the face of all of them. It's important to be prudent, since new evidence may always come along. But when there is a large, coherent and consistent body of evidence, as there is with climate change, it's safe to talk in terms of certainty.

For more on risk and uncertainty see our understanding uncertainty section.

Sequences of numbers can have limits. For example, the sequence 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, ... has the limit 0 and the sequence 0, 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, ... has the limit 1.

But not all number sequences behave so nicely. For example, the sequence 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, 1/5, 4/5, ... keeps jumping up and down, rather than getting closer and closer to one particular number. We can, however, discern some sort of limiting behaviour as we move along the sequence: the numbers never become larger than 1 or smaller than 0. And what's more, moving far enough along the sequence, you can find numbers that get as close as you like to both 1 and 0. So both 0 and 1 have some right to be considered limits of the sequence — and indeed they are: 1 is the limit superior and 0 is the limit inferior, so-called for obvious reasons.

But can you define these limits superior and inferior for a general sequence , for example the one shown in the picture? Here’s how to do it for the limit superior. First look at the whole sequence and find its least upper bound: that’s the smallest number that’s bigger than all the numbers in the sequence. Then chop off the first number in the sequence, and again find the least upper bound for the new sequence. This might be smaller than the previous least upper bound (if that was equal to ), but not bigger. Then chop off the first two numbers and again find the least upper bound.

Keep going, chopping off the first three, four, five, etc numbers, to get a sequence of least upper bounds (indicated by the red curve in the picture). In this sequence every number is either equal to or smaller than the number before. The limit superior is defined to be the limit of these least upper bounds. It always exists: since the sequence of least upper bounds is either constant or decreasing, it will either approach minus infinity or some other finite limit. The limit superior could also be equal to plus infinity, if there are numbers in the sequence that get arbitrarily large.

The limit inferior is defined in a similar way, only that you look at the sequence of greatest lower bounds and then take the limit of that.

You can read more about the limits inferior and superior in the Plus article The Abel Prize 2012.

An infinite set is called countable if you can count it. In other words, it's called countable if you can put its members into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, ... . For example, a bag with infinitely many apples would be a countable infinity because (given an infinite amount of time) you can label the apples 1, 2, 3, etc.

Two countably infinite sets A and B are considered to have the same "size" (or cardinality) because you can pair each element in A with one and only one element in B so that no elements in either set are left over. This idea seems to make sense, but it has some funny consequences. For example, the even numbers are a countable infinity because you can link the number 2 to the number 1, the number 4 to 2, the number 6 to 3 and so on. So if you consider the totality of even numbers (not just a finite collection) then there are just as many of them as natural numbers, even though intuitively you'd think there should only be half as many.

Something similar goes for the rational numbers (all the numbers you can write as fractions). You can list them as follows: first write down all the fractions whose denominator and numerator add up to 2, then list all the ones where the sum comes to 3, then 4, etc. This is an unfailing recipe to list all the rationals, and once they are listed you can label them by the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, ... . So there are just as many rationals as natural numbers, which again seems a bit odd because you'd think that there should be a lot more of them.

It was Galileo who first noticed these funny results and they put him off thinking about infinity. Later on the mathematician Georg Cantor revisited the idea. In fact, Cantor came up with a whole hierarchy of infinities, one "bigger" than the other, of which the countable infinity is the smallest. His ideas were controversial at first, but have now become an accepted part of pure mathematics.

You can find out more about all this in our collection of articles on infinity.