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

Prime numbers are a central topic of study in math. Despite being an object of fascination for millennia, there are still a lot of unsolved problems involving primes. Prime numbers are one of the ...

A Proof from Antiquity Mathematics has an unlimited number of prime number building blocks. Euclid proved this more than 2,000 years ago with a simple thought experiment. Suppose there were only a ...

Working on the centuries-old twin primes conjecture, two solitary researchers and a massive collaboration have made enormous advances over the last six months.

Largest known prime number found The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a cooperative computing project, helps find a prime that has nearly 13 million digits.

An unknown mathematician, Yitang Zhang, has revolutionized his field and helped move forward a 2,000-year-old conjecture about prime numbers. His counterintuitive findings show that special pairs ...

This ginormous number has a whopping 41,024,320 digits, which isn’t very helpful for mathematicians but is certainly exciting for math nerds.

Math historian Peter S. Rudman suggests that Greek mathematicians were likely the first to understand the concept of prime numbers, around 500 B.C.E.