As the public spokesperson for the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine, I participate in a series of collegiate debates around the country with theologians and intelligent design advocates on the ...

Mathematicians rejoice when they prove that seemingly impossible things exist. Such is the case with a new proof posted online in March by Cédric Pilatte, a first-year graduate student at the ...

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 ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime ...

Both arithmetic aficionados and the mathematically challenged will be equally captivated by new research that upends hundreds of years of popular belief about prime numbers. Contrary to what just ...

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, ...

Number theory is the branch of mathematics that deals with the properties of whole numbers. Many number theorists are motivated purely by mathematical intrigue, and historically number theory had few ...

IT CAN often feel like our days are governed by numbers in the most mundane ways. They tell you that you are going to be late for work, how much interest you are paying on your mortgage and how old ...

And yet, again and again, number theory finds unexpected applications in science and engineering, from leaf angles that (almost) universally follow the Fibonacci sequence, to modern encryption ...