Mathematicians have spent millennia trying to understand prime numbers – those only divisible by themselves and 1 –  but so far no one has discovered a pattern for the primes. Now mathematician Simon Plouffe has discovered a new method to produce long sequences of prime numbers, improving on previous efforts.

For example, we’ve known since the 18th century that n² + n + 41 is prime for values of n up to 39. It breaks down at n = 40, as the …