In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. We occasionally dig into our question bag, provide ...

Update, Jan. 4, 2018: On Wednesday, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that a computer owned by Jonathan Pace in Germantown, Tennessee, discovered a new prime number. At 23,249,425 ...

There's a new behemoth in the ongoing search for ever-larger prime numbers — and it's nearly 25 million digits long. A prime is a number that can be divided only by two whole numbers: itself and 1.

A new prime number has been discovered that is more than 16 million digits larger than the largest prime number ever found. The number is 2^136279841-1, which is 41,024,320 decimal digits and would ...

Luke Durant, a researcher and amateur mathematician, has identified the largest new prime number known to humankind. The newly discovered prime number is 2 to the power of 136,279,841, then minus one.