The discovery of the largest prime number ever found has just been announced to the world. 2 136,279,841 -1, known as M136279841, was found by amateur “prime-hunter” Luke Durant on October 11 ...

Today, people use complex computing networks to search for prime numbers with millions of digits. But early mathematicians were running these calculations by hand.

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 Proof from Antiquity Mathematics has an unlimited number of prime number building blocks. Euclid proved this more than 2,000 years ago with a simple thought experiment. Suppose there were only a ...

By giving a better bound on the number of zeros with a real part of 3/4, Guth and Maynard automatically proved results about how prime numbers are distributed.

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