Prime numbers are found hidden in nature, but humans have made spectacular use of them, writes mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. Ever since humans evolved on this planet we have been trying to make ...

An international team of scientists has obtained the prime factors of the RSA challenge number RSA-768, using the Number Field Sieve. An international team of scientists from EPFL (Switzerland), INRIA ...

Both arithmetic aficionados and the mathematically challenged will be equally captivated by new research that upends hundreds of years of popular belief about prime numbers. Contrary to what just ...

There's a new prime number on the block, and everyone is itching to get to know it. Even though the text file came in at a whopping 25 megabytes, we actually counted the number of instances in the ...

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime numbers are truly random, or if ...