“We’ve been stuck and running out of ideas on the problem for a long time, so it’s automatically exciting when anyone comes up with new insights,” said James Maynard, a mathematician at the University ...

A new proof has debunked a conspiracy that mathematicians feared might haunt the number line. In doing so, it has given them another set of tools for understanding arithmetic’s fundamental building ...

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 ...

Mrs. Post and her kids, Hayden and Hallie, play a curveball game to review what prime and composite numbers are. Rise and Shine is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on ...

On April 17, a paper arrived in the inbox of Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s preeminent journals. Written by a mathematician virtually unknown to the experts in his field — a ...

For centuries, prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help identify them and the way they’re distributed among other numbers.

Prime numbers are the ones that have only two factors: 1 and itself. Credit: Ssindhwani / Wikimedia Commons Prime numbers are those divisible only by themselves and by one. Despite their apparent ...

Filling a test tube with molecules made from folded DNA can work as a simple computer. The approach has been used to split two numbers into prime factors. Conventional computers work by passing ...