Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

mathematics number theory prime numbers twin primes conjecture All topics More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes came up with a method for finding prime numbers that continues ...

Prime numbers, whole numbers greater than one with only two factors (one and themselves), are fundamental in mathematics. They serve as building blocks for all other whole numbers, a concept known as ...

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 ...