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 supercomputer has something for the record books. A computer has found the largest known prime number. It's 22 million digits long. Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search — -- Here's one for the ...

as the atoms of arithmetic, prime numbers have always occupied a special place on the number line. Now, Jared Duker Lichtman, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Oxford, has resolved a ...

Prime numbers, whole numbers greater than one with only two factors (one and themselves), are fundamental in mathematics. They serve as building blocks for all other whole numbers, a concept known as ...

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 ...

“You don’t have to believe in God, but you have to believe in The Book,” the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős once said. The Book, which only exists in theory, contains the most elegant proofs of ...

You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. Follow Andy Kiersz Every time Andy publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox!

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 ...

Digitally delicate prime numbers become composite with this one weird trick. Math researchers proved these primes exist using the bucket proof method. There are no known examples so far, but ...

Despite finding no specific examples, researchers have proved the existence of a pervasive kind of prime number so delicate that changing any of its infinite digits renders it composite. Take a look ...

Update, Jan. 4, 2018: On Wednesday, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that a computer owned by Jonathan Pace in Germantown, Tennessee, discovered a new prime number. At 23,249,425 ...