Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...
Imagine a number made up of a vast string of ones: 1111111…111. Specifically, 136,279,841 ones in a row. If we stacked up that many sheets of paper, the resulting tower would stretch into the ...
Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Prime numbers are numbers that are not products of smaller whole numbers. Jeremiah Bartz A shard of smooth bone etched with ...
Peruvian mathematician Harald Helfgott gained worldwide attention in 2013 when he solved a 271-year-old problem: the so-called Goldbach’s weak conjecture, according to which every odd number greater ...
JON PACE had spent 14 years searching for a monster. A finance manager at FedEx in Memphis, Tennessee, he was more comfortable trawling through spreadsheets than hunting exotic beasts. He also ...