Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Furthermore, mathematicians ...

PRIME numbers may have been studied for over 2000 years, but there is always something new to learn. A method for finding primes first devised by the ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes in 240 BC ...

Ken Ono, a top mathematician and advisor at the University of Virginia, has helped uncover a striking new way to find prime numbers—those puzzling building blocks of arithmetic that have kept ...

On March 20, American-Canadian mathematician Robert Langlands received the Abel Prize, celebrating lifetime achievement in mathematics. Langlands’ research demonstrated how concepts from geometry, ...

Update, Jan. 4, 2018: On Wednesday, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that a computer owned by Jonathan Pace in Germantown, Tennessee, discovered a new prime number. At 23,249,425 ...

In an ingenious Reddit post this week, user Gedanke shared an image of a “Gaussian Prime that looks like Gauss.” That’s it up there, in all its glory. So who’s the guy in the picture? Carl Friedrich ...

Why bother finding new prime numbers? The question really is of the form: Why bother being interested in ${X} when it has no practical use at the present time ${Y}. Do you know how how many values of ...

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 ...

For centuries, prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help identify them and the way they're distributed among other numbers.