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If you remember back to studying maths at school, you might recall that prime numbers are numbers that only be divided equally by themselves and the number one. So 2, 3, 5, 7 and 11 are primes. 4 isn't because it can be divided by the factors 1, 2 and 4. Prime numbers are important for cryptography and security of data and discovering new ones is challenge. Finding increasingly large primes takes time, even for computers, because a number has to be checked with numbers smaller than it to make sure they don't divide in evenly, making the number non-prime. In this podcast, Ira talks with Jack Murtagh, math writer and columnist for Scientific American, about why prime numbers are so cool, and the quest to find the largest one.