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 ...

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

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

Using a notion called integer partitions, mathematicians have discovered a new way to detect prime numbers while also connecting two areas of math in an unexpected way When you purchase through links ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when the ...

Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when the mathematical stakes are high, as with the Riemann hypothesis, whose ...

A famed mathematical enigma is once again in the spotlight. The Riemann hypothesis, posited in 1859 by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, is one of the biggest unsolved puzzles in mathematics. The ...

“We’ve been stuck and running out of ideas on the problem for a long time, so it’s automatically exciting when anyone comes up with new insights,” said James Maynard, a mathematician at the University ...

THIS interesting “Cambridge Tract” is concerned mainly with the behaviour, for large values of x, of the function n(x), which denotes the number of primes not exceeding x. The first chapter gives some ...