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. Contrary to what just ...

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2. 3. 5. 7. 11. 13. 17. And so on. This is far from a comprehensive list of prime numbers—if we were to compile and write out an exhaustive list of all known prime numbers, this would be a truly ...

After a six-year drought, we now have a new largest known prime number, thanks to an amateur mathematics sleuth who deployed an army of graphics processing units (GPUs) to crunch through the ...

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 themselves ...

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.

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 ...