Montgomery happened to find strikingly similar behavior in the prime numbers— specifically, the correlations between the ...

Ken Ono, a top mathematician and advisor at the University of Virginia, has helped uncover a striking new way to find prime numbers—those puzzling building blocks of arithmetic that have kept ...

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 ...

For centuries, prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help identify them and the way they're distributed among other numbers.

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 ...