Restart66
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| Joined: 16 Dec 2012 |
| Total Posts: 372 |
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| 26 Mar 2014 07:20 AM |
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. A natural number greater than 1 that is not a prime number is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because only 1 and 5 evenly divide it, whereas 6 is composite because it has the divisors 2 and 3 in addition to 1 and 6. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic establishes the central role of primes in number theory: any integer greater than 1 can be expressed as a product of primes that is unique up to ordering. The uniqueness in this theorem requires excluding 1 as a prime because one can include arbitrarily many instances of 1 in any factorization, e.g., 3, 1 × 3, 1 × 1 × 3, etc. are all valid factorizations of 3. The property of being prime (or not) is called primality. A simple but slow method of verifying the primality of a given number n is known as trial division. It consists of testing whether n is a multiple of any integer between 2 and \sqrt{n}. Algorithms much more efficient than trial division have been devised to test the primality of large numbers. Particularly fast methods are available for numbers of special forms, such as Mersenne numbers. As of February 2013, the largest known prime number has 17,425,170 decimal digits. There are infinitely many primes, as demonstrated by Euclid around 300 BC. There is no known useful formula that sets apart all of the prime numbers from composites. However, the distribution of primes, that is to say, the statistical behaviour of primes in the large, can be modelled. The first result in that direction is the prime number theorem, proven at the end of the 19th century, which says that the probability that a given, randomly chosen number n is prime is inversely proportional to its number of digits, or to the logarithm of n. Many questions around prime numbers remain open, such as Goldbach's conjecture (that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes), and the twin prime conjecture (that there are infinitely many pairs of primes whose difference is 2). Such questions spurred the development of various branches of number theory, focusing on analytic or algebraic aspects of numbers. Primes are used in several routines in information technology, such as public-key cryptography, which makes use of properties such as the difficulty of factoring large numbers into their prime factors. Prime numbers give rise to various generalizations in other mathematical domains, mainly algebra, such as prime elements and prime ideals. Most early Greeks did not even consider 1 to be a number,[4] and so they did not consider it a prime. In the 19th century however, many mathematicians did consider the number 1 a prime. For example, Derrick Norman Lehmer's list of primes up to 10,006,721, reprinted as late as 1956,[5] started with 1 as its first prime.[6] Henri Lebesgue is said to be the last professional mathematician to call 1 prime.[7] Although a large body of mathematical work would still be valid when calling 1 a prime, the above fundamental theorem of arithmetic would not hold as stated. For example, the number 15 can be factored as 3 · 5 or 1 · 3 · 5. If 1 were admitted as a prime, these two presentations would be considered different factorizations of 15 into prime numbers, so the statement of that theorem would have to be modified. Furthermore, the prime numbers have several properties that the number 1 lacks, such as the relationship of the number to its corresponding value of Euler's totient function or the sum of divisors function. The crucial importance of prime numbers to number theory and mathematics in general stems from the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which states that every integer larger than 1 can be written as a product of one or more primes in a way that is unique except for the order of the prime factors.[2] Primes can thus be considered the “basic building blocks” of the natural numbers. For example: 23244 = 2 · 2 · 3 · 13 · 149 = 22 · 3 · 13 · 149. (22 denotes the square or second power of 2.) As in this example, the same prime factor may occur multiple times. A decomposition: n = p1 · p2 · ... · pt of a number n into (finitely many) prime factors p1, p2, ... to pt is called prime factorization of n. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic can be rephrased so as to say that any factorization into primes will be identical except for the order of the factors. So, albeit there are many prime factorization algorithms to do this in practice for larger numbers, they all have to yield the same result. If p is a prime number and p divides a product ab of integers, then p divides a or p divides b. This proposition is known as Euclid's lemma.[3] It is used in some proofs of the uniqueness of prime factorizations. |
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Restart66
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| Joined: 16 Dec 2012 |
| Total Posts: 372 |
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