A computing project on the Internet called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search has discovered a new Mersenne prime number, only the 47th since ancient Greek mathematicians first uncovered them.

A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...

Ever hear of a Mersenne prime? These are prime numbers that are one less than a power of two. Named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th century, there is a ...

Ever hear of a Mersenne prime? These are prime numbers that are one less than a power of two. Named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th century, there is a ...

Why it matters: Why search for large primes? Important cryptography algorithms have been based on prime numbers and according to GIMPS, they're also fun to hunt and collect. Plus, there's a financial ...

A supercomputer has something for the record books. A computer has found the largest known prime number. It's 22 million digits long. Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search — -- Here's one for the ...

There's a new behemoth in the ongoing search for ever-larger prime numbers — and it's nearly 25 million digits long. A prime is a number that can be divided only by two whole numbers: itself and 1.

Editor's Note: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story omitted part of the calculation for the new prime number, correctly described below as 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times ...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Mathematicians at the University of Central Missouri have discovered a record-setting prime number that's so large it would take about 6,000 pages of paper to print, the school ...

For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an all-consuming ...