10 Things Absolutely Nobody Knows The Answer To

9. What The Deal With Prime Numbers Is

They've got nothing to do with Transformers, so you can just roll on, fans of robots in poor disguises (like, seriously, how do the Dinobots plan to blend in on modern-day Earth? Ridiculous). Maths enthusiasts, though? Roll up, roll up, because we have got an unsolved mystery for you. Principally, prime numbers: what's the deal?

No, wait, calm down, we know what a prime number is. It's a digit that can only be divided by one and itself. But what's so special about them? Prime numbers are used in public key encryption, which is the security that makes shopping - and using your bank details - online in any way safe. For some reason, those hackers just can't crack these magical prime numbers. And nobody knows why.

We also don't know how many prime numbers there are - in theory, they are infinite, if you wanna count that high - or when they'll appear, since they're pretty much random and lacking in sequence. Actually, tell a lie, there is a mooted pattern, which you can find through an equation called the Riemann hypothesis. Except nobody can actually crack that equation in order to prove that there's a pattern.

Prime numbers are the building blocks of mathematics, but nobody - not even Johnny Math (or whoever the preeminent mathematician of the day is) - really knows much about them. Bonus fact: 77345993 is a prime number, and when you look at that upside down on a calculator it looks like "EGGSHELLS". 58008 isn't a prime number.