Prime numbers, the "atoms of arithmetic," have captivated mathematicians for centuries. These numbers, divisible only by themselves and one, appear deceptively random yet hide intricate patterns.

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Both arithmetic aficionados and the mathematically challenged will be equally captivated by new research that upends hundreds of years of popular belief about prime numbers. Contrary to what just ...

Like physics, math has its own set of "fundamental particles" — the prime numbers, which can't be broken down into smaller natural numbers. They can only be divided by themselves and 1. And in a new ...

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 ...

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 ...

Imagine a number made up of a vast string of ones: 1111111…111. Specifically, 136,279,841 ones in a row. If we stacked up that many sheets of paper, the resulting tower would stretch into the ...