“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 ...

Like many math students, I had dreams of mathematical greatness. I thought I was close once. A difficult algebra problem in college kept me working late into the night. After hours of struggle, I felt ...

An exciting breakthrough by an academic little known before last year is firing up mathematicians. Now even playwrights are getting in on the act. Leslie Katz led a team that explored the intersection ...

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Infinity down, only 69,999,997 to go. New research has proven that prime numbers don't just disappear as numbers get larger — instead, there is an infinite number of prime numbers separated by a ...

Like a mirror image of Bedford's Law, mathematicians have found a pattern in prime numbers that raises more questions than it answers. Share on Facebook (opens in a new window) Share on X (opens in a ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American When I saw a math paper with the phrase ...

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Prime numbers just got less lonely. A proof announced this week claims to show that the number of primes with a near-neighbour that is also a prime number is infinite – although the “near-neighbour” ...