A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...
In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. We occasionally dig into our question bag, provide ...
Editor's Note: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story omitted part of the calculation for the new prime number, correctly described below as 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times ...
Somewhere out there on the number line, huge prime numbers are lurking, waiting to be discovered. On Wednesday, a new one was. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, an organization devoted to ...
2. 3. 5. 7. 11. 13. 17. And so on. This is far from a comprehensive list of prime numbers—if we were to compile and write out an exhaustive list of all known prime numbers, this would be a truly ...
An odd new paper without peer review claims prime numbers have "genes," "roots," and “offspring." Prime numbers are essential to modern life because they underpin all of encryption. What is written ...
This month, GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, announced the discovery of the largest known prime number: 2<sup>74,207,281</sup>-1. That's two, multiplied 74,207,281 times, with 1 ...
Existing color systems, such as RGB and CYMK, are all text-based and require a large range of values to represent different colors, making them difficult to compute and time-consuming to convert.