A review of Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire. With the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994, Derbyshire says, “the Riemann ...

As a high school student in the mid-1990s, Pace Nielsen encountered a mathematical question that he’s still struggling with to this day. But he doesn’t feel bad: The problem that captivated him, ...

I. There should actually be a lot of algebra in this book, much more than I have been able to present. My focus has been on Bernhard Riemann and his work on prime numbers and the zeta function. That ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves ...

Prime numbers might just have lost their mystery – and online security could change forever. At a basic level, prime numbers are relatively simple to understand. They can only be divided by themselves ...

Still, Larsen’s most recent obsession felt different, “longer and more intense than most of his other projects,” she said. For more than a year and a half, Larsen couldn’t stop thinking about a ...

A Missouri professor, one of a team of nearly 100,000 volunteers, has found a highly unusual 17 million digit number -- and brought a prime-hunting project closer to a $150,000 prize. Stephen ...

Number theorist Yitang Zhang, who went from obscurity to luminary status in 2013 for cracking a century-old question about prime numbers, now claims to have solved another. The problem is similar to — ...

Tom Apostol, Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Caltech, wrote the following tribute to the Riemann Hypothesis (RH) in 1955 and performed it at the Caltech Number Theory conference held in June of ...