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 ...

Students in Melissa Williams' kindergarten class at the Westminster School in Atlanta, Georgia, practice connecting quantities to written numbers — a key part of number sense. Credit: Holly Korbey for ...

For thousands of years, philosophers have pondered cardinality: knowing “how many.” Using a series of crude estimates, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes worked out the approximate number of ...

Helena Osana received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for this research. Jairo A. Navarrete-Ulloa receives funding from the National Agency for Research and ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...