MATHEMATICIANS have spent millennia trying to understand prime numbers – those only divisible by themselves and 1 – but so far no one has discovered a formula for all of them. Now mathematician Simon ...

(CNN) — You know you’re a geek if you felt all warm and fuzzy inside when you read that headline. If you got here by accident, here’s the news: The biggest prime number yet has been discovered. It is ...

The largest-ever prime number has been discovered in Central Missouri — and oh, what a number it is. The record number, nicknamed M74207281, has more than 20 million digits. That's nearly 5 million ...

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 ...

A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has exactly two distinct factors, 1 and the number itself. So, if p is a prime number then its only factors will be 1 and p itself. 4: It can be ...

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 ...

There's a new behemoth in the ongoing search for ever-larger prime numbers — and it's nearly 25 million digits long. A prime is a number that can be divided only by two whole numbers: itself and 1.

The record number, nicknamed M74207281, has more than 20 million digits. That's nearly 5 million digits longer than the previous record. If you printed each digit 1 mm wide, the number would stretch ...