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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A laptop represents today’s tools fueling the global search for massive prime numbers, essential for both mathematics and ...