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

The number certainly doesn't seem particularly exciting. It's not a prime number or a power of 2 or the square of some other number. The digits don't seem to follow any obvious pattern.

An effort in which thousands of people donate their computers' unused processing power uncovers the largest prime number so far known.

The Riemann hypothesis is the most important open question in number theory—if not all of mathematics. It has occupied experts for more than 160 years. And the problem appeared both in ...

A prime number is a number that is only divisible by one and itself, which is essentially saying that it has no divisor. That takes half of all possible numbers off the table right away (the evens ...

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 amount of prime numbers, seen as yellow dots in this hexagonal spiral of positive integers, wanes as the numbers get bigger — a relationship described by the prime number theorem and proved many ...

Record For Largest Known Prime Number Broken By Amateur Mathematician Using Free Software It is the 52nd Mersenne prime to be found since they were first studied over 350 years ago.

And Durant's newly-discovered Mersenne prime, which according to GIMPS is over 16 million digits larger than the previous prime number record, took a hell of a lot of computing.

Number theorist Yitang Zhang tackled a problem that could tame the randomness of prime numbers. Credit: George Csicsery/Zala Films A mathematician who went from obscurity to luminary status in ...