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, ...

The Basel problem 25 is named from the Swiss city in whose university two of the Bernoulli brothers successively served as professor of mathematics (Jakob, 1687–1705, Johann, 1705–1748). I mentioned ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Computer scientists in India have cracked an age-old mathematical problem by designing a method for computers to quickly prove whether a figure is a prime number--a vital step in cryptography. RSA, a ...

A prime number is a number that is only divisible by one and itself, which is essentially saying that it has no divisor. That takes half of all possible numbers off the table right away (the evens), ...

For millennia, mathematicians have wondered whether odd perfect numbers exist, establishing an extraordinary list of restrictions for the hypothetical objects in the process. Insight on this question ...

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 ...