Luke Durant was folding his laundry right into his suitcase ahead of a trip back home to Alabama when he decided to check his computer and see if he had made history. He figured that, like every other ...

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 ...

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After a six-year drought, we now have a new largest known prime number, thanks to an amateur mathematics sleuth who deployed an army of graphics processing units (GPUs) to crunch through the ...

While I was looking for a gift for a child’s birthday, a math book fell into my hands. I am always fascinated when authors write about abstract scientific topics for children, whether it’s on Albert ...

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 ...

Luke Durant, a researcher and amateur mathematician, has identified the largest new prime number known to humankind. The newly discovered prime number is 2 to the power of 136,279,841, then minus one.

In context: Prime numbers are those divisible only by 1 and themselves and include mathematical oddballs like 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. While they start out simple, primes rapidly become sparse amid the ...