Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the new largest known prime number, having 22,338,618 digits, on a university computer volunteered by Curtis Cooper for the project. The ...

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, ...

You probably remember prime numbers from school. They’re numbers like 2, 3 and 17, which are only divisible by themselves and one. But the prime numbers you learned in school are puny compared to the ...

Is 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727 prime? Before you ask the Internet for an answer, can you consider how you might answer that question without a ...