While I was looking for a gift for a child’s birthday, a math book fell into my hands. I am always fascinated when authors write about abstract scientific topics for children, whether it’s on Albert ...

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 ...

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 ...

Thousands of computers across the world are currently scouring the number line in a scavenger hunt for rare mathematical gems. Enthusiasts looking for larger and larger prime numbers, which are ...

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Image made with elements from Canva. Let’s go back to grade school—do you remember learning about prime numbers? They’re numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. So 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and ...

Luke Durant, a researcher and amateur mathematician, has identified the largest new prime number known to humankind. The newly discovered prime number is 2 to the power of 136,279,841, then minus one.

“You don’t have to believe in God, but you have to believe in The Book,” the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős once said. The Book, which only exists in theory, contains the most elegant proofs of ...

A Missouri professor, one of a team of nearly 100,000 volunteers, has found a highly unusual 17 million digit number -- and brought a prime-hunting project closer to a $150,000 prize. Stephen ...