The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime ...

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime numbers are truly random, or if ...

Montgomery happened to find strikingly similar behavior in the prime numbers— specifically, the correlations between the ...

For the first time in more than 25 years, mathematicians have proven a new way to identify prime numbers, and in doing so developed a toolkit that could allow further advances in number theory. Prime ...

For centuries, prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help identify them and the way they’re distributed among other numbers.

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, ...