The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime ...

Mathematicians rejoice when they prove that seemingly impossible things exist. Such is the case with a new proof posted online in March by Cédric Pilatte, a first-year graduate student at the ...

mathematics number theory prime numbers twin primes conjecture All topics More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes came up with a method for finding prime numbers that continues ...

Montgomery happened to find strikingly similar behavior in the prime numbers— specifically, the correlations between the ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

In 1992, three physicists began an argument about how many numbers we need to fully describe the universe. Their surprisingly ...

Mathematicians sometimes think of their research as a garden and unsolved problems as seeds waiting to sprout. Some problems are analogous to tulip bulbs. As mathematicians work to solve them, they ...