The basic building blocks of the whole numbers remain mysterious.

Here’s a number to savor: 2 43,112,609-1. Printing out all 13 million digits in 12-point type would create a number 30 miles long. But here are a few of the digits, from the beginning and the end of ...

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 ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Jon Pace, a longtime FedEx employee, has loved math since high ...

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.

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 ...

“You don’t have to believe in God, but you have to believe in The Book,” the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős once said. The Book, which only exists in theory, contains the most elegant proofs of ...

You must have learnt about prime numbers in Class 4 or 5. Want to recall it? So, prime numbers are those numbers which are only divisible by 1 and themselves. They do not have any other factors ...

There's a new biggest known prime number in the universe. It's called M77232917, and it looks like this: Despite being a ridiculously huge number (just that text file, which readers can download here, ...

Here’s a number to savor: 2 43,112,609-1. Its size is mind-boggling. With nearly 13 million digits, it makes the number of atoms in the known universe seem negligible, a mere 80 digits. But its true ...