Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...

The online computer game “Is this prime?” tests a player’s knowledge of prime numbers—and just surpassed 2,999,999 attempts. Give it a whirl. The Greek mathematician Euclid may very well have proved, ...

The ongoing search for ever-larger prime numbers continues apace. Primes are the atoms of arithmetic: every whole number is a unique product of primes. For example, 21 is the product of primes three ...

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 ...

An amateur mathematician from San Jose, US, has discovered the largest prime number yet with over 41 million digits. Prime numbers, the building blocks of mathematics, are divisible only by themselves ...

Prime numbers are the ones that have only two factors: 1 and itself. Credit: Ssindhwani / Wikimedia Commons Prime numbers are those divisible only by themselves and by one. Despite their apparent ...

In context: Prime numbers are those divisible only by 1 and themselves and include mathematical oddballs like 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. While they start out simple, primes rapidly become sparse amid the ...