For years, a French mathematician searched for a proof that a gigantic number is prime. His method is still used 150 years ...

Prime numbers are a central topic of study in math. Despite being an object of fascination for millennia, there are still a lot of unsolved problems involving primes. Prime numbers are one of the most ...

A prime number is a whole number, greater than 1, that only has two factors. A factor is a number that divides another number evenly, with no remainder or decimal. The factors of a prime number are ...

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 ...

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 ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

The world belongs to the mathematicians and the physicists. We lay people may pump our minds with Discovery Channel specials, but they’re the ones who get to understand how it all really works–how the ...

A kind of order may be buried in the occurrence of indivisible numbers. A team of physicists may have stumbled upon a surprising discovery about one of the deepest and best-studied questions in pure ...

An amateur mathematician from San Jose, US, has discovered the largest prime number yet with over 41 million digits. Prime numbers, the building blocks of mathematics, are divisible only by themselves ...