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Prime number: A positive integer with exactly two positive divisors: itself and 1. The primes form an infinite sequence 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, ... Composite number: A positive integer that can be factored into a product of smaller positive integers. Every integer greater than one is either prime or composite.
The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, from around 1550 BC, has Egyptian fraction expansions of different forms for prime and composite numbers. [14] However, the earliest surviving records of the study of prime numbers come from the ancient Greek mathematicians, who called them prōtos arithmòs (πρῶτος ἀριθμὸς).
A composite number is a positive integer that can be formed by multiplying two smaller positive integers. Accordingly it is a positive integer that has at least one divisor other than 1 and itself. [1] [2] Every positive integer is composite, prime, or the unit 1, so the composite numbers are exactly the numbers that are not prime and not a unit.
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. The first 1000 primes are listed below, followed by lists of notable types of prime numbers in alphabetical order, giving their respective first terms. 1 is neither prime nor composite.
Hence, for a highly composite number n, the k given prime numbers p i must be precisely the first k prime numbers (2, 3, 5, ...); if not, we could replace one of the given primes by a smaller prime, and thus obtain a smaller number than n with the same number of divisors (for instance 10 = 2 × 5 may be replaced with 6 = 2 × 3; both have four ...
It does so by iteratively marking as composite (i.e., not prime) the multiples of each prime, starting with the first prime number, 2. The multiples of a given prime are generated as a sequence of numbers starting from that prime, with constant difference between them that is equal to that prime. [1] This is the sieve's key distinction from ...
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 ...
Every positive integer greater than 1 is either the product of two or more integer factors greater than 1, in which case it is a composite number, or it is not, in which case it is a prime number. 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.