The basic building blocks of the whole numbers remain mysterious.

Image made with elements from Canva. Let’s go back to grade school—do you remember learning about prime numbers? They’re numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. So 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and ...

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 ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

In an ingenious Reddit post this week, user Gedanke shared an image of a “Gaussian Prime that looks like Gauss.” That’s it up there, in all its glory. So who’s the guy in the picture? Carl Friedrich ...

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 are only divisible by themselves and one. Robert Brook via Getty Images In the 17th century, French monk and mathematician Marin Mersenne developed a method to find prime numbers: values ...