A new algorithm brings together the advantages of randomness and deterministic processes to reliably construct large prime numbers.

In fact, they have applications to something as ubiquitous and mundane as making a purchase online. Every time you enter your credit card number on the Internet, prime numbers spring into action.

The largest known prime number has been discovered, smashing the previous record by more than 16 million digits.

Somewhere out there on the number line, huge prime numbers are lurking, waiting to be discovered. On Wednesday, a new one was. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime… ...

Prime Numbers Could Be Predictable, Says Huge Potential Mathematical Breakthrough Grab your Ouija board and an ancient Greek dictionary; Eratosthenes is gonna want to know about this.

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 ...

What Ono and his team have now discovered is that partitions —a concept that counts the ways a number can be broken down into sums of smaller integers— contain hidden patterns capable of revealing ...

Why Prime Numbers Still Surprise and Mystify Mathematicians 2300 years later, new patterns continue to show up in these indivisible tricksters ...

To study primes, mathematicians strain whole numbers through one virtual mesh after another until only primes remain. This sieving process produced tables of millions of primes in the 1800s. It ...

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.

These numbers, which are only divisible by 1 and themselves, form the atoms of number theory, so to speak, and have fascinated humankind for thousands of years.

A year after tackling how close together prime number pairs can stay, mathematicians have now made the first major advance in 76 years in understanding how far apart primes can be.