Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, ...

For millennia, mathematicians have wondered whether odd perfect numbers exist, establishing an extraordinary list of restrictions for the hypothetical objects in the process. Insight on this question ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Prime numbers might just have lost their mystery – and online security could change forever. At a basic level, prime numbers are relatively simple to understand. They can only be divided by themselves ...

Still, Larsen’s most recent obsession felt different, “longer and more intense than most of his other projects,” she said. For more than a year and a half, Larsen couldn’t stop thinking about a ...

A Missouri professor, one of a team of nearly 100,000 volunteers, has found a highly unusual 17 million digit number -- and brought a prime-hunting project closer to a $150,000 prize. Stephen ...

This month, GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, announced the discovery of the largest known prime number: 2^74,207,281-1. That's two, multiplied 74,207,281 times, with 1 ...

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 ...

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 ...