Can you find prime numbers?
Robert Brook/Science Photo Library
For the first time in more than 25 years, mathematicians have proven a new way to identify prime numbers, and in doing so developed a toolkit that will enable further advances in number theory.
Prime numbers, which are divisible by themselves or only by one, are the mathematical building blocks of whole numbers, and mathematicians have been studying how to find and combine prime numbers for hundreds of years. “New results about prime numbers don’t come very often, so every new development feels valuable,” says Benjamin Green…
