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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.
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.
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.
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 ...
If the result is different from 1, then n is composite. If it is 1, then n may be prime. If a n −1 (modulo n) is 1 but n is not prime, then n is called a pseudoprime to base a. In practice, if a n −1 (modulo n) is 1, then n is usually prime. But here is a counterexample: if n = 341 and a = 2, then ()
The fundamental theorem can be derived from Book VII, propositions 30, 31 and 32, and Book IX, proposition 14 of Euclid's Elements.. If two numbers by multiplying one another make some number, and any prime number measure the product, it will also measure one of the original numbers.
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.
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.