Several years ago one of us, Toni, asked another of us, Marco, to come to his office at the Institute of Photonic Sciences, a large research center in Castelldefels near Barcelona. “There is a problem ...

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

Scientists found exotic prime numbers may play a role in black hole physics, revealing a surprising connection between number theory and the extreme environments of the universe.

There are three kinds of prime numbers. The first is a solitary outlier: 2, the only even prime. After that, half the primes leave a remainder of 1 when divided by 4. The other half leave a remainder ...