A mathematician who went from obscurity to luminary status in 2013 for cracking a century-old question about prime numbers now claims to have solved another. The problem is similar to—but distinct ...

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 ...

As of October 2024, we have found the biggest prime number we know of — and it took almost 6 years to find it. To generate this number, you multiply 2 by itself 136,279,841 times (resulting in an ...

Ken Ono, the STEM Advisor to the Provost and Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia, has been named a runner-up for the 2025 Cozzarelli Prize in the physical sciences, ...

Prime numbers are essential for technologies like RSA encryption, which rely on the difficulty of guessing these numerals. A new paper shows that another area of mathematics called integer partition ...

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 ...