Here’s a number to savor: 2 43,112,609-1. Its size is mind-boggling. With nearly 13 million digits, it makes the number of atoms in the known universe seem negligible, a mere 80 digits. But its true ...

Image made with elements from Canva. Let’s go back to grade school—do you remember learning about prime numbers? They’re numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. So 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and ...

A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...

There's a new behemoth in the ongoing search for ever-larger prime numbers — and it's nearly 25 million digits long. A prime is a number that can be divided only by two whole numbers: itself and 1.

There's a new biggest known prime number in the universe. It's called M77232917, and it looks like this: Despite being a ridiculously huge number (just that text file, which readers can download here, ...

On March 20, American-Canadian mathematician Robert Langlands received the Abel Prize, celebrating lifetime achievement in mathematics. Langlands’ research demonstrated how concepts from geometry, ...

One of my favorite anecdotes about prime numbers concerns Alexander Grothendieck, who was among the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. According to one account, he was once asked to ...

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

A prime number is a number that is only divisible by one and itself, which is essentially saying that it has no divisor. That takes half of all possible numbers off the table right away (the evens), ...

“You don’t have to believe in God, but you have to believe in The Book,” the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős once said. The Book, which only exists in theory, contains the most elegant proofs of ...

Here’s a number to savor: 2 43,112,609-1. Printing out all 13 million digits in 12-point type would create a number 30 miles long. But here are a few of the digits, from the beginning and the end of ...