Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Furthermore, mathematicians ...

Ken Ono, a top mathematician and advisor at the University of Virginia, has helped uncover a striking new way to find prime numbers—those puzzling building blocks of arithmetic that have kept ...

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 ...

You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. Follow Andy Kiersz Every time Andy publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox!

Prime numbers, those integers divisible only by one and themselves, have fascinated mathematicians for millennia. Their distribution among other numbers remains a mystery, despite technological ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when the ...

You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. Follow Andy Kiersz Every time Andy publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox!