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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. However, 4 is composite because it is a ...
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 .
In mathematics, the prime number theorem ( PNT) describes the asymptotic distribution of the prime numbers among the positive integers. It formalizes the intuitive idea that primes become less common as they become larger by precisely quantifying the rate at which this occurs.
In mathematics, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, also called the unique factorization theorem and prime factorization theorem, states that every integer greater than 1 can be represented uniquely as a product of prime numbers, up to the order of the factors. [3] [4] [5] For example,
A simple formula is. for positive integer , where is the floor function, which rounds down to the nearest integer. By Wilson's theorem, is prime if and only if . Thus, when is prime, the first factor in the product becomes one, and the formula produces the prime number . But when is not prime, the first factor becomes zero and the formula ...
German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Mathematics is the queen of the sciences—and number theory is the queen of mathematics." Number theorists study prime numbers as well as the properties of mathematical objects constructed from integers (for example, rational numbers), or defined as generalizations of the integers ...
Definition. An ideal P of a commutative ring R is prime if it has the following two properties: If a and b are two elements of R such that their product ab is an element of P, then a is in P or b is in P, P is not the whole ring R. This generalizes the following property of prime numbers, known as Euclid's lemma: if p is a prime number and if p ...
Class number criterion. An odd prime number p is defined to be regular if it does not divide the class number of the pth cyclotomic field Q(ζ p), where ζ p is a primitive pth root of unity. The prime number 2 is often considered regular as well. The class number of the cyclotomic field is the number of ideals of the ring of integers Z(ζ p ...