“You don’t have to believe in God, but you have to believe in The Book,” the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős once said. The Book, which only exists in theory, contains the most elegant proofs of ...

Like many math students, I had dreams of mathematical greatness. I thought I was close once. A difficult algebra problem in college kept me working late into the night. After hours of struggle, I felt ...

The usually quiet world of mathematics is abuzz with a claim that one of the most important problems in number theory has been solved. Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University in Japan has ...

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I. The 1859 paper “On the Number of Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quantity” was Bernhard Riemann’s only publication on number theory, and the only one of his productions that contained no ...

IN the published correspondence of Euler there is a note from him to Goldbach, or, the other way, from Goldbach to Euler, in which a very wonderful theorem is stated which has never been proved by ...

A prime number is a number that is only divisible by one and itself, which is essentially saying that it has no divisor. That takes half of all possible numbers off the table right away (the evens), ...