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

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 ...

In 2017, however, a developer named Mihai Preda designed an open-source program called GpuOwl to continue the Mersenne prime research through these muc-improved machines.

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.

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 ...