A review of Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire. With the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994, Derbyshire says, “the Riemann ...

After outgrowing its original home, the National Museum of Mathematics has added new exhibits and an art gallery space in ...

For millennia, mathematicians have wondered whether odd perfect numbers exist, establishing an extraordinary list of restrictions for the hypothetical objects in the process. Insight on this question ...

The Basel problem 25 is named from the Swiss city in whose university two of the Bernoulli brothers successively served as professor of mathematics (Jakob, 1687–1705, Johann, 1705–1748). I mentioned ...

A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves ...

Still, Larsen’s most recent obsession felt different, “longer and more intense than most of his other projects,” she said. For more than a year and a half, Larsen couldn’t stop thinking about a ...

Prime numbers might just have lost their mystery – and online security could change forever. At a basic level, prime numbers are relatively simple to understand. They can only be divided by themselves ...

I. There should actually be a lot of algebra in this book, much more than I have been able to present. My focus has been on Bernhard Riemann and his work on prime numbers and the zeta function. That ...