MATHEMATICIANS have spent millennia trying to understand prime numbers – those only divisible by themselves and 1 – but so far no one has discovered a formula for all of them. Now mathematician Simon ...

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 ...

(CNN) — You know you’re a geek if you felt all warm and fuzzy inside when you read that headline. If you got here by accident, here’s the news: The biggest prime number yet has been discovered. It is ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

If you've graduated high-school and you're reading this article, you probably at least know the following about prime numbers: Primes are the set of all numbers that can only be equally divided by 1 ...

The largest prime number yet has been discovered -- and it's 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long. The number ...