Ken Ono, a top mathematician and advisor at the University of Virginia, has helped uncover a striking new way to find prime ...

Using a notion called integer partitions, mathematicians have discovered a new way to detect prime numbers while also ...

Today, people use complex computing networks to search for prime numbers with millions of digits. But early mathematicians were running these calculations by hand.

In this case, you could multiply all prime numbers up to p with each other and add 1: 2 x 3 x 5 x 7 x 11 x ... x p + 1. The result cannot be divided by any of the existing prime numbers.

Among the first 10 prime numbers — 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 and 29 — you can see gaps that consist of one or more composite numbers (numbers that are not prime, like 4, 12 or 27). You can ...

Prime numbers, when expressed as that number of dots, can be arranged only in a single row or column, rather than a square or rectangle. David Eppstein/Wikimedia Commons.

Say you want to count all the rough primes between 1 and 200. First, consider a handful of the smallest primes—like 2, 3, 5, and 7. Then list all the numbers that aren’t divisible by those primes.

Prime numbers are essential to modern life because they underpin all of encryption. What is written makes no sense, but there may be good ideas, buried in it, for future discussion.

For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an all ...

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.