A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...

Somewhere out there on the number line, huge prime numbers are lurking, waiting to be discovered. On Wednesday, a new one was. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, an organization devoted to ...

While I was looking for a gift for a child’s birthday, a math book fell into my hands. I am always fascinated when authors write about abstract scientific topics for children, whether it’s on Albert ...

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A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

Meet the new largest known prime number. It starts with a 4, continues on for 23 million digits, then ends with a 1. As is true with all prime numbers, it can only be evenly divided by one and itself.

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 ...