Luke Durant, a researcher and amateur mathematician, has identified the largest new prime number known to humankind. The newly discovered prime number is 2 to the power of 136,279,841, then minus one.

In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. We occasionally dig into our question bag, provide ...

An unimaginable number has just been discovered. Its particularity? It is a prime number with more than 41 million digits, an unprecedented find. Named M136279841 and calculated as the result of 2 ...

Update, Jan. 4, 2018: On Wednesday, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that a computer owned by Jonathan Pace in Germantown, Tennessee, discovered a new prime number. At 23,249,425 ...

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, ...

Naturally, I couldn't resist. I started with my cell phone number, which is the product of three small primes and an 8-digit prime (for obvious reasons, I won't say what they are). What about my ...

UCLA mathematicians appear to have won a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for discovering a 13-million-digit prime number that has long been sought by computer users. While the ...

Say hello to the world's largest prime number. Prime numbers, which are divisible only by one and themselves—such as one, two, three, five, seven, 11 and so on—become less common as numbers get larger ...