A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...

May 30 (UPI) --A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique - the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have ...

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 ...

Prime numbers have captivated mathematicians for centuries with their unpredictable and seemingly random distribution. In a groundbreaking preprint study, researchers devised a novel method that ...

One of my favorite anecdotes about prime numbers concerns Alexander Grothendieck, who was among the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. According to one account, he was once asked to ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. For many people ...

After a six-year drought, we now have a new largest known prime number, thanks to an amateur mathematics sleuth who deployed an army of graphics processing units (GPUs) to crunch through the ...