Twin primes are two prime numbers that have a distance of two on the number line; that is, they are directly consecutive if you ignore even numbers. Examples include 3 and 5, 5 and 7, and 17 and 19.

A prime number is a whole number that can only be divided by 1 and itself. A former Nvidia programmer discovered the world's largest known prime number using graphics processing units.

The world's largest known prime number has been discovered, but we can't show it because it's so large it would take up 21 standard-sized novels to turn into text. Called M136279841, it comes to ...

Fortunately, Édouard Lucas developed a prime number test in 1878, later proved by Derrick Henry Lehmer in 1930. Their work resulted in an efficient algorithm for evaluating potential Mersenne ...

Grothendieck is said to have replied: “57.” Although it is hard to determine the truth of this story, 57 has since been known in nerd circles as the Grothendieck “prime number”—even ...

For centuries, prime numbers have fascinated mathematicians, from ancient artifacts to modern tech. Now, cloud computing and global collaborations are pushing the search for record-breaking primes ...

Prime numbers are infinite, and proving anything about patterns in them is notoriously difficult. Mathematicians continue to chip away at pair primes, which are primes that are two apart: 11 and ...

Prime numbers, when expressed as that number of dots, can be arranged only in a single row or column, rather than a square or rectangle. David Eppstein/Wikimedia Commons In the middle ages, Arab ...

Around 300 B.C.E., the Greek mathematician and logician Euclid proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Euclid began by assuming that there is a finite number of primes.