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One of my favorite anecdotes about prime numbers concerns Alexander Grothendieck, who was among the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. According to one account, he was once asked to ...

[attach id="634803" size="medium" align="right"]The 2,160-bit public key, in hexadecimal, of a local website that employs the RSA algorithm to encrypt its data. As ...

Don't know if you've heard, but there's a new largest known prime number in town. On 26 December, mathematicians scored a late Christmas present when a computer owned by a 51-year-old engineer in the ...

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 ...