What is your favorite number? For many people, it may be an irrational number such as pi (π), Euler's number (e) or the square root of 2. Even among the natural numbers (positive integers), there are ...

Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

One of my favorite anecdotes about prime numbers concerns Alexander Grothendieck, who was among the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. According to one account, he was once asked to ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime ...

A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves ...

An effort in which thousands of people donate their computers' unused processing power uncovers the largest prime number so far known. Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote ...

Luke Durant, a researcher and amateur mathematician, has identified the largest new prime number known to humankind. The newly discovered prime number is 2 to the power of 136,279,841, then minus one.

After shocking the mathematics community with a major result in 2013, Yitang Zhang now says he has solved an analogue of the celebrated Riemann hypothesis. A mathematician who went from obscurity to ...