A prime number is an integer, or whole number, that has only two factors — 1 and itself. Put another way, a prime number can be divided evenly only by 1 and by itself.

Numbers like 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11 are all prime numbers. What fewer people know is why these numbers are so important, and how the mathematical logic behind them has resulted in vital applications ...

This works not only for n = 4 but also for any n.By using this formula, you can always get the nth prime number.. But so far I have suppressed one piece of information. We have assumed that a ...

A year after tackling how close together prime number pairs can stay, mathematicians have now made the first major advance in 76 years in understanding how far apart primes can be.

Prime numbers near to each other tend to avoid repeating their last digits, the mathematicians say: that is, a prime that ends in 1 is less likely to be followed by another ending in 1 than one ...

Large prime numbers are massively useful in cryptography, which is the study and use of codes. Let’s say you’re a hacker who wants to intercept secure messages from one government to another.

Fortunately, there's a simpler way to write the number: 2^77,232,917 minus 1. In other words, the new largest known prime number is one less than 2 times 2 time 2 times 2…and so on 77,232,917 times.

As the atoms of arithmetic, prime numbers have always occupied a special place on the number line. Now, Jared Duker Lichtman, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Oxford, has resolved a ...

The new prime number discovered at the very end of 2017 corresponds to M77232917. It has 23,249,425 digits – almost a million digits more than the previous record-holding prime.

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, an organization devoted to doing exactly what its name suggests, announced that it had discovered a new prime number, the largest ever found: \(2 ...

as the atoms of arithmetic, prime numbers have always occupied a special place on the number line. Now, Jared Duker Lichtman, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Oxford, ...

A clear rule determines exactly what makes a prime: it’s a whole number that can’t be exactly divided by anything except 1 and itself. But there’s no discernable pattern in the occurrence of ...