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A prime number is a natural number that has exactly two distinct natural number divisors: the number 1 and itself. To find all the prime numbers less than or equal to a given integer n by Eratosthenes' method: Create a list of consecutive integers from 2 through n: (2, 3, 4, ..., n). Initially, let p equal 2, the smallest prime number.
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.
For example, 3 is a Mersenne prime as it is a prime number and is expressible as 2 2 − 1. [1] [2] The exponents p corresponding to Mersenne primes must themselves be prime, although the vast majority of primes p do not lead to Mersenne primes—for example, 2 11 − 1 = 2047 = 23 × 89. [3]
A prime sieve or prime number sieve is a fast type of algorithm for finding primes. There are many prime sieves. The simple sieve of Eratosthenes (250s BCE), the sieve of Sundaram (1934), the still faster but more complicated sieve of Atkin [1] (2003), sieve of Pritchard (1979), and various wheel sieves [2] are most common.
The following table lists the progression of the largest known prime number in ascending order. [4] Here M p = 2 p − 1 is the Mersenne number with exponent p, where p is a prime number. The longest record-holder known was M 19 = 524,287, which was the largest known prime for 144 years. No records are known prior to 1456. [citation needed]
However, it does not contain all the prime numbers, since the terms gcd(n + 1, a n) are always odd and so never equal to 2. 587 is the smallest prime (other than 2) not appearing in the first 10,000 outcomes that are different from 1. Nevertheless, in the same paper it was conjectured to contain all odd primes, even though it is rather inefficient.
For example 111111111111111 (15 digits) is divisible by 111 and 11111 in that base. If a number m can be expressed as a string of prime length to some base, such a number may or may not be prime, but commonly is not; for example, to base 10, there are only three such numbers of length less than 100 (1 is by definition, not prime). The three are:
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 + +.