For centuries, prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help identify them and the way they're distributed among other numbers.

For centuries, prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help identify them and the way they’re distributed among other numbers.

Why bother finding new prime numbers? The question really is of the form: Why bother being interested in ${X} when it has no practical use at the present time ${Y}. Do you know how how many values of ...

PRIME numbers may have been studied for over 2000 years, but there is always something new to learn. A method for finding primes first devised by the ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes in 240 BC ...

Ken Ono, a top mathematician and advisor at the University of Virginia, has helped uncover a striking new way to find prime numbers—those puzzling building blocks of arithmetic that have kept ...

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

Update, Jan. 4, 2018: On Wednesday, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that a computer owned by Jonathan Pace in Germantown, Tennessee, discovered a new prime number. At 23,249,425 ...

So, here's a real reason why finding big primes like this is important: it drives improvements in supercomputing. The Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search (GIMPS) software that volunteers install on ...

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 ...