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 ...

May 30 (UPI) --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 ...

Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...

The largest known prime number has been discovered by an amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee. The new number is 2 136,279,841 – 1, which beats the previous title holder (2 82,589,933 – 1) by ...

So, here's a real reason why finding big primes like this is important: it drives improvements in supercomputing. The Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search (GIMPS) software that volunteers install on ...