Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...

The online computer game “Is this prime?” tests a player’s knowledge of prime numbers—and just surpassed 2,999,999 attempts. Give it a whirl. The Greek mathematician Euclid may very well have proved, ...

A 300-billion-digit number is the biggest known pseudoprime, a number which looks like a prime but isn’t. The techniques used to find this behemoth could help keep online transactions secure. The ...

A million-dollar puzzle relating to prime numbers could be tackled using only a mid-sized quantum computer. Instead mathematicians find ways to count primes below ever bigger values of X and compare ...

An amateur mathematician from San Jose, US, has discovered the largest prime number yet with over 41 million digits. Prime numbers, the building blocks of mathematics, are divisible only by themselves ...

Peruvian mathematician Harald Helfgott gained worldwide attention in 2013 when he solved a 271-year-old problem: the so-called Goldbach’s weak conjecture, according to which every odd number greater ...