For centuries, prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help identify them and the way they're distributed among other numbers.

For centuries, prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help identify them and the way they’re distributed among other numbers.

Ken Ono, a top mathematician and advisor at the University of Virginia, has helped uncover a striking new way to find prime numbers—those puzzling building blocks of arithmetic that have kept ...

Why bother finding new prime numbers? The question really is of the form: Why bother being interested in ${X} when it has no practical use at the present time ${Y}. Do you know how how many values of ...

A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...

Image made with elements from Canva. Let’s go back to grade school—do you remember learning about prime numbers? They’re numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. So 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and ...

The largest known prime number has been discovered by an amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee. The new number is 2 136,279,841 – 1, which beats the previous title holder (2 82,589,933 – 1) by ...

mathematics number theory prime numbers twin primes conjecture All topics More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes came up with a method for finding prime numbers that continues ...

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

One of my favorite anecdotes about prime numbers concerns Alexander Grothendieck, who was among the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. According to one account, he was once asked to ...

There are infinitely many prime numbers, but the biggest one we know of goes by the name M136279841 and contains more than 41 million digits. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...