All mainstream credit card numbers obey a mathematical trick designed to catch the most common typos. It’s called the Luhn ...

Albert said the proprietary number-picking algorithm for Powerball and Mega Millions, the two multistate games, analyzes every set of winning numbers since the games were launched in 1992 and 1996.

Mathematicians long wondered whether it’s possible to express the number 33 as the sum of three cubes — that is, whether the equation 33 = x ³+ y ³+ z ³ has a solution. They knew that 29 could be ...