Content about “

prime number

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A quick look at one of the most important theorems in number theory.

You are faced with a difficult problem, it is not easily solved. How do you feel? Well, if you are Avi Wigderson, one of the winners of the 2021 Abel Prize, you are very happy!

James Maynard, one of the prize winners at the European Congress of Mathematics 2016, is counting primes that don't have 7s in them. But why?

Fermat's little theorem and fake primes.

Look for hidden gems in the gaps between known prime numbers.

Agreeing to pay £50,000 for something worth £2 wouldn't win you any haggling competitions. In mathematics, however, a similar result can bring you international acclaim. This is the case with recent progress towards the famous twin prime conjecture.

This year's Abel Prize has been awarded to the Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne for "seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields".

The prime numbers are the atoms amongst the integers, and while we know that there are infinitely many of them, there's no general formula that generates them all. Julian Havil looks at a little-known algorithm that sieves out all primes up to a given number, and which is astonishing in its simplicity.

The primes are the building blocks of our number system, but there's no general formula that will give you all of them. If you want them, you have to hunt them down one by one. Abigail Kirk investigates a method that does just that.