(CNN) — For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an ...

Luke Durant was folding his laundry right into his suitcase ahead of a trip back home to Alabama when he decided to check his computer and see if he had made history. He figured that, like every other ...

Luke Durant, a 36 year-old researcher and former NVIDIA employee, used a free program, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), to identify the new prime through an advanced algorithm. The ...

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 ...

Congratulations to (2^136,279,841)-1 on your newly-confirmed prime status. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Earlier this month, ...

An amateur mathematician from San Jose, US, has discovered the largest prime number yet with over 41 million digits. Prime numbers, the building blocks of mathematics, are divisible only by themselves ...

Prime numbers, whole numbers greater than one with only two factors (one and themselves), are fundamental in mathematics.

The world's largest known prime number has been discovered, but we can't show it because it's so large it would take up 21 standard-sized novels to turn into text. Called M136279841, its shorthand ...

Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - After running 1,000 computers non-stop for 39 days to uncover the world's largest prime number yet, a Missouri college professor said this week he is starting all ...