A 300-billion-digit number is the biggest known pseudoprime, a number which looks like a prime but isn’t. The techniques used to find this behemoth could help keep online transactions secure. The ...

RSA cryptography, which is one of the typical public key cryptosystems, is a cryptosystem based on the fact that it is difficult to factor a composite number with a large number of digits into prime ...

So, here's a real reason why finding big primes like this is important: it drives improvements in supercomputing. The Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search (GIMPS) software that volunteers install on ...

An amateur mathematician from San Jose, US, has discovered the largest prime number yet with over 41 million digits. Prime numbers, the building blocks of mathematics, are divisible only by themselves ...

To determine if a number is prime, you can use the following steps: (i) Check if the number is greater than 1. Prime numbers must be greater than 1. (ii) Check divisibility: Divide the number by all ...