Ars has a rundown of the theoretical RSA process, and Wikipedia has a nice example of how RSA encryption works using relatively small prime numbers. But the significance of the keys' basis in ...

The largest known prime number has been discovered by an amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee. The new number is 2 136,279,841 – 1, which beats the previous title holder (2 82,589,933 ...

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 ...

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A new prime number has been discovered — and it's the biggest one known by almost five million digits. A prime number is a whole number greater than one that can only be divided evenly by ...

You probably remember prime numbers from school. They’re numbers like 2, 3 and 17, which are only divisible by themselves and one. But the prime numbers you learned in school are puny compared ...

Prime numbers are only divisible by themselves and one. Robert Brook via Getty Images In the 17th century, French monk and mathematician Marin Mersenne developed a method to find prime numbers ...