Luke Durant was folding his laundry right into his suitcase ahead of a trip back home to Alabama when he decided to check his computer and see if he had made history. He figured that, like every other ...

A 20-year-old Canadian finds the world's largest known prime number using a mere desktop computer, but he wasn?t working alone. Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. For many people ...

What is common to 2, 53 and 199? All three are prime numbers. These numbers are divisible by 1 and themselves, no others. There is an infinite number of prime numbers, but checking if a number is ...

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 2 77,232,917 -1, having 23,249,425 digits. A computer volunteered by Jonathan Pace made the find on ...

Prime numbers are only divisible by themselves and one. Robert Brook via Getty Images In the 17th century, French monk and mathematician Marin Mersenne developed a method to find prime numbers: values ...

Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

(CNN) — For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an ...

Meet the new largest known prime number. It starts with a 4, continues on for 23 million digits, then ends with a 1. As is true with all prime numbers, it can only be evenly divided by one and itself.