(CNN) — For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an ...
Luke Durant was folding his laundry right into his suitcase ahead of a trip back home to Alabama when he decided to check his computer and see if he had made history. He figured that, like every other ...
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.
Number enthusiasts may be looking to the new year with a touch of melancholy. Another perfect square like 2025 (45 2 = 2,025) ...
Congratulations to (2^136,279,841)-1 on your newly-confirmed prime status. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Add us as a preferred ...
“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 month, GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, announced the discovery of the largest known prime number: 2<sup>74,207,281</sup>-1. That's two, multiplied 74,207,281 times, with 1 ...
Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...