A review of Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire. With the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994, Derbyshire says, “the Riemann ...

Still, Larsen’s most recent obsession felt different, “longer and more intense than most of his other projects,” she said. For more than a year and a half, Larsen couldn’t stop thinking about a ...

As a high school student in the mid-1990s, Pace Nielsen encountered a mathematical question that he’s still struggling with to this day. But he doesn’t feel bad: The problem that captivated him, ...

The Basel problem 25 is named from the Swiss city in whose university two of the Bernoulli brothers successively served as professor of mathematics (Jakob, 1687–1705, Johann, 1705–1748). I mentioned ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Furthermore, mathematicians ...

Then it’s kind of a mystery to try to figure out why and how they’re related.” The Riemann hypothesis has proved to be a font of surprising connections all over math and beyond it, to the realm of the ...

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 ...

Prime numbers might just have lost their mystery – and online security could change forever. At a basic level, prime numbers are relatively simple to understand. They can only be divided by themselves ...

For millennia, mathematicians have wondered whether odd perfect numbers exist, establishing an extraordinary list of restrictions for the hypothetical objects in the process. Insight on this question ...

Tom Apostol, Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Caltech, wrote the following tribute to the Riemann Hypothesis (RH) in 1955 and performed it at the Caltech Number Theory conference held in June of ...