Luke Durant was folding his laundry right into his suitcase ahead of a trip back home to Alabama when he decided to check his computer and see if he had made history. He figured that, like every other ...

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 ...

Prime numbers have captivated mathematicians for thousands of years—and now cloud computing is helping them chase the biggest ones yet. Reading time 5 minutes A shard of smooth bone etched with ...

(CNN) — For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an ...

A GIMPS survey has discovered a prime number with over 41 million digits, surpassing the previous record-holder by more than 16 million digits. Reading time 2 minutes Move aside 2 82,589,933-1, ...

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

Is 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727 prime? Before you ask the Internet for an answer, can you consider how you might answer that question without a ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime ...

A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves ...