This undated photo shows a spruce cone with a marked fibonacci number sequence. A numbers sequence thought up by the 13th century Italian mathematician known as Fibonacci plays out in plants, from ...

When random number sequences appear in our lives repeatedly — on license plates, as phone numbers or dates, or on documents — we may think it's just a coincidence. But these occurrences are anything ...

Two mathematicians have found a strange pattern in prime numbers—showing that the numbers are not distributed as randomly as theorists often assume. “Every single person we’ve told this ends up ...

About a year ago, the theoretical chemist Salvatore Torquato met with the number theorist Matthew de Courcy-Ireland to explain that he had done something highly unorthodox with prime numbers, those ...

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime numbers are truly random, or if ...