Prime numbers are whole numbers greater than 1 that are not divisible by any whole number other than 1 and itself. The first few are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 … To explain how the RSA algorithm works ...

The online computer game “Is this prime?” tests a player’s knowledge of prime numbers—and just surpassed 2,999,999 attempts. Give it a whirl.

An online collective, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, crunched numbers for days on end to discover a new prime number in December 2017. Here’s why it’s so important.

Numbers might not sound like they need discovering, but a crowd-sourced project has now identified the largest prime number known. The number was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime ...

How Do You Discover a 17 Million Digit Prime Number? The 48th Mersenne prime was recently discovered on the computer of a man named Dr. Curtis Cooper, and it’s 17 million digits long ...

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

An amateur mathematician from San Jose, US, has discovered the largest prime number yet with over 41 million digits. Prime numbers, the building blocks of mathematics, are divisible only by ...

He was the first to find a pattern in how prime numbers occurred, and even has a type of prime number named after him, from which the image above is entirely drawn.