The key issue in Syria today is who will win our side or the opposing side, which is a real axis of evil.

FORBES: A Tale of Two Repressions: Bahrain and Syria

Mr. LEVERETT: I'm suggesting that the axis of oil is a real strategic problem and the axis of evil, it strikes me, is a rhetorical framework that doesn't really provide a lot of strategic insight.

NPR: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Axis of Oil

And, as Euler's successor, Carl Friedrich Gauss, was to discover, if you plot real numbers on one axis of a graph and imaginary ones on the other, you create a plane that represents both sorts of numbers.

ECONOMIST: Beno?t Mandelbrot

On the security front, the Bolivian-Venezuelan-Iranian axis poses a real threat to regional stability and democracy and because of the ties of Iran and Venezuela to terrorist groups such as FARC and Hezbollah, this alliance poses a significant threat to the United States.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: chavez_castro_morales copy

Complex numbers, which have a real and an imaginary part added together, are the points on this plane that do not lie on either axis.

ECONOMIST: Beno?t Mandelbrot