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In mathematics, particularly in number theory, Hillel Furstenberg's proof of the infinitude of primes is a topological proof that the integers contain infinitely many prime numbers. When examined closely, the proof is less a statement about topology than a statement about certain properties of arithmetic sequences.
Euclid offered a proof published in his work Elements (Book IX, Proposition 20), [1] which is paraphrased here. [2] Consider any finite list of prime numbers p 1, p 2, ..., p n. It will be shown that there exists at least one additional prime number not included in this list. Let P be the product of all the prime numbers in the list: P = p 1 p ...
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways of writing it as a product, 1 × 5 or 5 × 1, involve 5 itself. However, 4 is composite because it is a ...
Both the Furstenberg and Golomb topologies furnish a proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers. [1] [2] A sketch of the proof runs as follows: Fix a prime p and note that the (positive, in the Golomb space case) integers are a union of finitely many residue classes modulo p. Each residue class is an arithmetic progression, and thus clopen.
The proof of this statement requires some calculus and analytic number theory . The particular case a = 1 (i.e., concerning the primes that are congruent to 1 modulo some n) can be proven by analyzing the splitting behavior of primes in cyclotomic extensions, without making use of calculus (Neukirch 1999, §VII.6).
There are known formulae to evaluate the prime-counting function (the number of primes smaller than a given value) faster than computing the primes. This has been used to compute that there are 1,925,320,391,606,803,968,923 primes (roughly 2 × 10 21 ) smaller than 10 23 .
As of December 2024, the largest known prime of the form p n # + 1 is 7351117# + 1 (n = 498,865) with 3,191,401 digits, also found by the PrimeGrid project. Euclid's proof of the infinitude of the prime numbers is commonly misinterpreted as defining the primorial primes, in the following manner: [2]
Not all Euclid numbers are prime. E 6 = 13# + 1 = 30031 = 59 × 509 is the first composite Euclid number. Every Euclid number is congruent to 3 modulo 4 since the primorial of which it is composed is twice the product of only odd primes and thus congruent to 2 modulo 4. This property implies that no Euclid number can be a square.