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 ...

Prime numbers are a central topic of study in math. Despite being an object of fascination for millennia, there are still a lot of unsolved problems involving primes. Prime numbers are one of the most ...

Numbers hide complex relationships that are tough to imagine. So here’s a pretty picture that brings them to light. The world belongs to the mathematicians and the physicists. We lay people may pump ...

On April 17, a paper arrived in the inbox of Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s preeminent journals. Written by a mathematician virtually unknown to the experts in his field — a ...

While I was looking for a gift for a child’s birthday, a math book fell into my hands. I am always fascinated when authors write about abstract scientific topics for children, whether it’s on Albert ...

Ask just about any mathematician, and they’ll tell you the same thing: you can’t predict the primes. Indeed, the pseudorandomness of these building blocks of mathematics – defined as numbers that can ...

“Mathematical symbolism and metaphor are present in every kind of literature, from the humblest of fairy tales right through to War and Peace,” claims mathematician Sarah Hart. In Once Upon a Prime, ...

There's a new behemoth in the ongoing search for ever-larger prime numbers — and it's nearly 25 million digits long. A prime is a number that can be divided only by two whole numbers: itself and 1.

Still, Larsen’s most recent obsession felt different, “longer and more intense than most of his other projects,” she said. For more than a year and a half, Larsen couldn’t stop thinking about a ...