A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography.

Prime numbers have captivated mathematicians for thousands of years—and now cloud computing is helping them chase the biggest ones yet.

New work attacks a long-standing barrier to understanding how prime numbers are distributed.

Both arithmetic aficionados and the mathematically challenged will be equally captivated by new research that upends hundreds of years of popular belief about prime numbers.

The problem is that the prime numbers do not seem to follow a simple pattern and instead appear randomly among the natural numbers.