Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. For many people ...

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 ...

In context: Prime numbers are those divisible only by 1 and themselves and include mathematical oddballs like 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. While they start out simple, primes rapidly become sparse amid the ...

Using a computer powered by an off-the-shelf Intel Core i5-6600 processor, a FedEx employee from Tennessee has discovered the largest prime number known to humanity. At 23,249,425 digits long, it’s ...

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 ...