Prime numbers are found hidden in nature, but humans have made spectacular use of them, writes mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. Ever since humans evolved on this planet we have been trying to make ...

A new prime number has been discovered that is more than 16 million digits larger than the largest prime number ever found. The number is 2^136279841-1, which is 41,024,320 decimal digits and would ...

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime numbers are truly random, or if ...

Montgomery happened to find strikingly similar behavior in the prime numbers— specifically, the correlations between the ...

In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. We occasionally dig into our question bag, provide ...

A prime number is an integer, or whole number, that has only two factors — 1 and itself. Put another way, a prime number can be divided evenly only by 1 and by itself. Prime numbers also must be ...

An odd new paper without peer review claims prime numbers have "genes," "roots," and “offspring." Prime numbers are essential to modern life because they underpin all of encryption. What is written ...

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.