Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, ...

The world belongs to the mathematicians and the physicists. We lay people may pump our minds with Discovery Channel specials, but they’re the ones who get to understand how it all really works–how the ...

A supercomputer has something for the record books. A computer has found the largest known prime number. It's 22 million digits long. Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search — -- Here's one for the ...

You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. Follow Andy Kiersz Every time Andy publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox!

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Jon Pace, a longtime FedEx employee, has loved math since high ...

Using a notion called integer partitions, mathematicians have discovered a new way to detect prime numbers while also connecting two areas of math in an unexpected way When you purchase through links ...

This past week, a FedEx employee from Germantown, Tenn., made a massive discovery — and it wasn't in any packages. John Pace found the largest prime number known to humankind. And that number goes on ...