An effort in which thousands of people donate their computers' unused processing power uncovers the largest prime number so far known. Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote ...

Somewhere out there on the number line, huge prime numbers are lurking, waiting to be discovered. On Wednesday, a new one was. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, an organization devoted to ...

Toronto Metropolitan University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation CA. Toronto Metropolitan University provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA-FR. A number is ...

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime numbers are truly random, or if ...

Update, Jan. 4, 2018: On Wednesday, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that a computer owned by Jonathan Pace in Germantown, Tennessee, discovered a new prime number. At 23,249,425 ...

The twin primes conjecture is one of the most important and difficult questions in mathematics. Two mathematicians have solved a parallel version of the problem for small number systems. On September ...

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 ...

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 ...