Prime numbers are only divisible by themselves and one. Robert Brook via Getty Images In the 17th century, French monk and mathematician Marin Mersenne developed a method to find prime numbers: values ...

Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

Jeremiah Bartz owns shares in Nvidia. A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like ...

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 ...

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 ...

While I was looking for a gift for a child’s birthday, a math book fell into my hands. I am always fascinated when authors write about abstract scientific topics for children, whether it’s on Albert ...

Prime numbers have been investigated for more than 2,000 years, since at least the era of the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid. There are infinitely many, but what is the largest known prime number?

Is 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727 prime? Before you ask the Internet for an answer, can you consider how you might answer that question without a ...

There are infinitely many prime numbers, but the biggest one we know of goes by the name M136279841 and contains more than 41 million digits. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...

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.

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A supercomputer has something for the record books. A computer has found the largest known prime number. It's 22 million digits long. Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search — -- Here's one for the ...