A review of Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire. With the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994, Derbyshire says, “the Riemann ...

For millennia, mathematicians have wondered whether odd perfect numbers exist, establishing an extraordinary list of restrictions for the hypothetical objects in the process. Insight on this question ...

“We’ve been stuck and running out of ideas on the problem for a long time, so it’s automatically exciting when anyone comes up with new insights,” said James Maynard, a mathematician at the University ...

The twin primes conjecture is one of the most important and difficult questions in mathematics. Two mathematicians have solved a parallel version of the problem for small number systems. On September ...

Computer scientists in India have cracked an age-old mathematical problem by designing a method for computers to quickly prove whether a figure is a prime number--a vital step in cryptography. RSA, a ...

Tom Apostol, Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Caltech, wrote the following tribute to the Riemann Hypothesis (RH) in 1955 and performed it at the Caltech Number Theory conference held in June of ...

The Basel problem 25 is named from the Swiss city in whose university two of the Bernoulli brothers successively served as professor of mathematics (Jakob, 1687–1705, Johann, 1705–1748). I mentioned ...

Then it’s kind of a mystery to try to figure out why and how they’re related.” The Riemann hypothesis has proved to be a font of surprising connections all over math and beyond it, to the realm of the ...

Prime numbers might just have lost their mystery – and online security could change forever. At a basic level, prime numbers are relatively simple to understand. They can only be divided by themselves ...

A prime number is a number that is only divisible by one and itself, which is essentially saying that it has no divisor. That takes half of all possible numbers off the table right away (the evens), ...