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 ...

Prime numbers are essential for technologies like RSA encryption, which rely on the difficulty of guessing these numerals. A new paper shows that another area of mathematics called integer partition ...

After shocking the mathematics community with a major result in 2013, Yitang Zhang now says he has solved an analogue of the celebrated Riemann hypothesis. A mathematician who went from obscurity to ...

As of October 2024, we have found the biggest prime number we know of — and it took almost 6 years to find it. To generate this number, you multiply 2 by itself 136,279,841 times (resulting in an ...

Ken Ono, the STEM Advisor to the Provost and Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia, has been named a runner-up for the 2025 Cozzarelli Prize in the physical sciences, ...