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 the first time in more than 25 years, mathematicians have proven a new way to identify prime numbers, and in doing so developed a toolkit that could allow further advances in number theory. Prime ...

John Voight receives funding from the Simons Foundation and is affiliated with the Number Theory Foundation. Imagine a number made up of a vast string of ones: 1111111…111. Specifically, 136,279,841 ...

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 ...

Luke Durant, a 36 year-old researcher and former NVIDIA employee, used a free program, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), to identify the new prime through an advanced algorithm. The ...