The best kinds of ideas about numbers are easy to understand but devilish to actually prove. We saw that in the YouTube channel Numberphile's video about the Collatz conjecture. Now that channel and ...

Mathematics is often about uncovering patterns. For example, certain areas of topology revolve around categorizing knots or geometric shapes, and number theory explores properties such as the ...

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In his rapid ascent to the top of his field, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries. When James Maynard was ...

If you've graduated high-school and you're reading this article, you probably at least know the following about prime numbers: Primes are the set of all numbers that can only be equally divided by 1 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A prime number is a whole number greater than one that has exactly two factors. Those two factors are one and the number itself. This definition is found across many school curriculums. Examples ...

A long-standing puzzle seems to constrain how addition and multiplication relate to each other. A graduate student has gone further than anyone else in establishing the connection. In 1983 the ...

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 ...