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 tally marks, may have represented ...

Last week, Yitang “Tom” Zhang, a popular math professor at the University of New Hampshire, stunned the world of pure mathematics when he announced that he had proven the “bounded gaps” conjecture ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has exactly two distinct factors, 1 and the number itself. So, if p is a prime number then its only factors will be 1 and p itself. 4: It can be ...

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 ...

The world belongs to the mathematicians and the physicists. We lay people may pump our minds with Discovery Channel specials, but they’re the ones who get to understand how it all really works–how the ...

Thousands of computers across the world are currently scouring the number line in a scavenger hunt for rare mathematical gems. Enthusiasts looking for larger and larger prime numbers, which are ...

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 ...

The largest known prime number has been discovered by an amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee. The new number is 2 136,279,841 – 1, which beats the previous title holder (2 82,589,933 – 1) by ...

Digitally delicate prime numbers become composite with this one weird trick. Math researchers proved these primes exist using the bucket proof method. There are no known examples so far, but ...