Like physics, math has its own set of “fundamental particles”—the prime numbers, which can’t be broken down into smaller ...

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when the ...

The Millennium Prize Problems, announced in 2000 by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States, are problems with a prize of $1 million (approximately 160 million yen). One of these problems ...

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 ...

Ken Ono, a top mathematician and advisor at the University of Virginia, has helped uncover a striking new way to find prime numbers—those puzzling building blocks of arithmetic that have kept ...

A famed mathematical enigma is once again in the spotlight. The Riemann hypothesis, posited in 1859 by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, is one of the biggest unsolved puzzles in mathematics. The ...