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This is a list of articles about prime numbers. A prime number (or prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. By Euclid's theorem, there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Subsets of the prime numbers may be generated with various formulas for primes.
But it does have to be in the same order; so, for example, 991 is still a minimal prime even though a subset of the digits can form the shorter prime 19 by changing the order. Similarly, there are exactly 32 composite numbers which have no shorter composite subsequence:
These numbers have been proved prime by computer with a primality test for their form, for example the Lucas–Lehmer primality test for Mersenne numbers. “!” is the factorial, “#” is the primorial, and () is the third cyclotomic polynomial, defined as + +.
As of October 2024 the largest known prime number is a Mersenne prime with 41,024,320 decimal digits. [1] [2] There are infinitely many primes, as demonstrated by Euclid around 300 BC. No known simple formula separates prime numbers from composite numbers.
A composite number with two prime factors is a semiprime or 2-almost prime (the factors need not be distinct, hence squares of primes are included). A composite number with three distinct prime factors is a sphenic number. In some applications, it is necessary to differentiate between composite numbers with an odd number of distinct prime ...
Certain number-theoretic methods exist for testing whether a number is prime, such as the Lucas test and Proth's test. These tests typically require factorization of n + 1, n − 1, or a similar quantity, which means that they are not useful for general-purpose primality testing, but they are often quite powerful when the tested number n is ...
For example, 15 is a composite number because 15 = 3 · 5, but 7 is a prime number because it cannot be decomposed in this way. If one of the factors is composite, it can in turn be written as a product of smaller factors, for example 60 = 3 · 20 = 3 · (5 · 4) .
Ω(n), the prime omega function, is the number of prime factors of n counted with multiplicity (so it is the sum of all prime factor multiplicities). A prime number has Ω(n) = 1. The first: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37 (sequence A000040 in the OEIS). There are many special types of prime numbers. A composite number has Ω(n) > 1.