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.

Mrs. Post and her kids, Hayden and Hallie, play a curveball game to review what prime and composite numbers are. Rise and Shine is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on ...

It's videos like this one from YouTube user Numberphile that make us mortals realize why mathematicians view math as art, or perhaps as power. Highly composite numbers—numbers that have more divisible ...

Prime numbers have captivated mathematicians for centuries with their unpredictable and seemingly random distribution. In a groundbreaking preprint study, researchers devised a novel method that ...

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 ...

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 ...

A prime factor is a natural number, other than 1, whose only factors are 1 and itself. The first few prime numbers are actually 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on. Now we can also use what’s called prime ...

Despite finding no specific examples, researchers have proved the existence of a pervasive kind of prime number so delicate that changing any of its infinite digits renders it composite. Take a look ...

Last week, Yitang “Tom” Zhang, a popular math professor at the University of New Hampshire, stunned the world of pure mathematics when he announced that he had proven the “bounded gaps” conjecture ...

The online computer game “Is this prime?” tests a player’s knowledge of prime numbers—and just surpassed 2,999,999 attempts. Give it a whirl. The Greek mathematician Euclid may very well have proved, ...