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 ...

For instance, the largest known prime number, which is 2 136279841 − 1, is 41,024,320 digits long. At first, that number may seem mind-bogglingly large.

But Ono and his co-authors discovered a connection between prime numbers and integer partitions, which divvy up numbers into all their possible smaller sums—the number four, for example, can be ...