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, ...

RSA cryptography, which is one of the typical public key cryptosystems, is a cryptosystem based on the fact that it is difficult to factor a composite number with a large number of digits into prime ...

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 ...

Numbers might not sound like they need discovering, but a crowd-sourced project has now identified the largest prime number known. The number was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search ...

One of the curious properties of mathematics is its beauty. But exactly what mathematicians mean by beauty is hard to capture. Perhaps the most famous example is Euler’s relation, e iπ + 1 = 0, which ...

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 ...