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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 .
A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 with no divisors other than 1 and itself. According to Euclid's theorem there are infinitely many prime numbers, so there is no largest prime. Many of the largest known primes are Mersenne primes , numbers that are one less than a power of two, because they can utilize a specialized primality ...
For example, π(10) = 4 because there are four prime numbers (2, 3, 5 and 7) less than or equal to 10. The prime number theorem then states that x / log x is a good approximation to π(x) (where log here means the natural logarithm), in the sense that the limit of the quotient of the two functions π(x) and x / log x as x increases without ...
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 ...
Mersenne primes and perfect numbers are two deeply interlinked types of natural numbers in number theory. Mersenne primes, named after the friar Marin Mersenne, are prime numbers that can be expressed as 2p − 1 for some positive integer p. For example, 3 is a Mersenne prime as it is a prime number and is expressible as 22 − 1.
In number theory, a regular prime is a special kind of prime number, defined by Ernst Kummer in 1850 to prove certain cases of Fermat's Last Theorem. Regular primes may be defined via the divisibility of either class numbers or of Bernoulli numbers . The first few regular odd primes are:
This category is for articles about classes (meaning subsets here) of prime numbers, for example primes generated by a particular formula or having a special property. See List of prime numbers for definitions and examples of many classes of primes.