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 ...

An effort in which thousands of people donate their computers' unused processing power uncovers the largest prime number so far known. Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote ...

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 ...

This month, GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, announced the discovery of the largest known prime number: 2^74,207,281-1. That's two, multiplied 74,207,281 times, with 1 ...

Members of a shared computing effort says they've found the largest known prime number. It has 6.3 million digits and is the 41st entry in the Mersenne subcategory of prime numbers. Stephen Shankland ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. It’s been nearly six years since math devotees discovered the last ...

In his senior year of high school, Daniel Larsen proved a key theorem about Carmichael numbers — strange entities that mimic the primes. “It would be a paper that any mathematician would be really ...