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.

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Meet the new largest known prime number. It starts with a 4, continues on for 23 million digits, then ends with a 1. As is true with all prime numbers, it can only be evenly divided by one and itself.

A new digital currency has been announced, which uses prime numbers as its proof of work. Primecoin is still in beta, but its goal is to provide a proof of concept that a digital currency can produce ...

In an ingenious Reddit post this week, user Gedanke shared an image of a “Gaussian Prime that looks like Gauss.” That’s it up there, in all its glory. So who’s the guy in the picture? Carl Friedrich ...

In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. We occasionally dig into our question bag, provide ...

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 ...

There are infinitely many prime numbers, but the biggest one we know of goes by the name M136279841 and contains more than 41 million digits. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...