Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

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 them identify primes and the way they are distributed among other ...

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 ...

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime numbers are truly random, or if ...

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.