Prime numbers are whole numbers greater than 1 that are not divisible by any whole number other than 1 and itself. The first few are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 … To explain how the RSA algorithm works ...

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This number has 22,338,618 digits, the last of which is a 1, and is nearly 5 million digits longer than the previous record prime.

An online collective, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, crunched numbers for days on end to discover a new prime number in December 2017. Here’s why it’s so important.

How Do You Discover a 17 Million Digit Prime Number? The 48th Mersenne prime was recently discovered on the computer of a man named Dr. Curtis Cooper, and it’s 17 million digits long ...

We have constructed a Carmichael number with 10,333,229,505 prime factors, and have also constructed Carmichael numbers with k prime factors for every k between 3 and 19,565,220. These computations ...