A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

Two mathematicians have found a strange pattern in prime numbers — showing that the numbers are not distributed as randomly as theorists often assume. “Every single person we’ve told this ends up ...

“We’ve been studying primes for a long time, and no one spotted this before,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal and University College London. “It’s crazy.” The ...

On December 26, 2017, J. Pace, G. Woltman, S. Kurowski, A. Blosser, and their co-authors announced the discovery of a new prime number: 2⁷⁷²³²⁹¹⁷-1. It's an excellent opportunity to take a small tour ...

The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They’re at the heart of modern number theory. The rational numbers are the most familiar numbers: 1, -5, ½, and every ...

Most of us learned what a prime number is in our early days of math class: An integer divisible only by itself and by one. But what you may not have realized is the search for the rarest of them is an ...

A collaborative computer project has discovered the largest known prime number. The new prime number is nearly one million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of ...

The distribution of prime numbers from 1 to 76,800, from left to right and top to bottom. A black pixel means that the number is first, while a white pixel means that it is not. Wikipedia, CC BY On ...