Mathematicians have spent millennia trying to understand prime numbers – those only divisible by themselves and 1 – but so far no one has discovered a pattern for the primes. Now mathematician Simon ...

The basic building blocks of the whole numbers remain mysterious.

A prime number is an integer, or whole number, that has only two factors — 1 and itself. Put another way, a prime number can be divided evenly only by 1 and by itself. Prime numbers also must be ...

An odd new paper without peer review claims prime numbers have "genes," "roots," and “offspring." Prime numbers are essential to modern life because they underpin all of encryption. What is written ...

The largest known prime number has been discovered by an amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee. The new number is 2 136,279,841 – 1, which beats the previous title holder (2 82,589,933 – 1) by ...