“We’ve been stuck and running out of ideas on the problem for a long time, so it’s automatically exciting when anyone comes up with new insights,” said James Maynard, a mathematician at the University ...

Warning! This article contains spoilers for Prime Target's episodes 1 and 2. Prime Target's episodes 1 and 2 pave the way for ...

In this audio interactive, five of the mathematicians who meet each week for the New York Number Theory Seminar answer (a prime number) of prime number questions, including: Why are prime numbers ...

On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries. Number theorists, however, ...

Would you like to be a millionaire? There are several ways to fulfill this dream. For two decades the U.S. edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? promised a million dollars if you could answer 15 ...

Mathematicians have been studying the distribution of prime numbers for thousands of years. Recent results about a curious kind of prime offer a new take on how spread out they can be. You may have ...

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 ...

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 ...

Prime numbers are essential for technologies like RSA encryption, which rely on the difficulty of guessing these numerals. A new paper shows that another area of mathematics called integer partition ...