A new prime number has been discovered that is more than 16 million digits larger than the largest prime number ever found. The number is 2^136279841-1, which is 41,024,320 decimal digits and would ...

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 ...

A prime number is an integer, or whole number, that has only two factors — 1 and itself. Put another way, a prime number can be divided evenly only by 1 and by itself. Prime numbers also must be ...

An odd new paper without peer review claims prime numbers have "genes," "roots," and “offspring." Prime numbers are essential to modern life because they underpin all of encryption. What is written ...

Existing color systems, such as RGB and CYMK, are all text-based and require a large range of values to represent different colors, making them difficult to compute and time-consuming to convert.

Mathematicians have unveiled a new record-breaking prime number: 2 74,207,281 – 1. It’s now the highest prime number ever discovered, eclipsing the previous record by 5 million. The prime’s discoverer ...

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 ...

The largest prime number yet found has been discovered by a mathematics enthusiast using his desktop computer. The monstrous number has over seven million digits. Josh Findley, who lives in Seattle, ...