If you've graduated high-school and you're reading this article, you probably at least know the following about prime numbers: Primes are the set of all numbers that can only be equally divided by 1 ...

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In 1847, Gabriel Lamé proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. Or so he thought. Lamé was a French mathematician who had made many important discoveries. In March ...

An odd new paper without peer review claims prime numbers have "genes," "roots," and “offspring." Prime numbers are essential to modern life because they underpin all of encryption. What is written ...

Any number can, in theory, be written as the product of prime numbers. For small numbers, this is easy (for example, the prime factors of 12 are 2, 2, and 3), but for large numbers, prime ...

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, whole numbers greater than one with only two factors (one and themselves), are fundamental in mathematics. They serve as building blocks for all other whole numbers, a concept known as ...

Naturally, I couldn't resist. I started with my cell phone number, which is the product of three small primes and an 8-digit prime (for obvious reasons, I won't say what they are). What about my ...

The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They’re at the heart of modern number theory. The rational numbers are the most familiar numbers: 1, -5, ½, and every ...