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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.
A prime sieve or prime number sieve is a fast type of algorithm for finding primes. There are many prime sieves. The simple sieve of Eratosthenes (250s BCE), the sieve of Sundaram (1934), the still faster but more complicated sieve of Atkin [1] (2003), sieve of Pritchard (1979), and various wheel sieves [2] are most common.
The first deterministic primality test significantly faster than the naive methods was the cyclotomy test; its runtime can be proven to be O((log n) c log log log n), where n is the number to test for primality and c is a constant independent of n. Many further improvements were made, but none could be proven to have polynomial running time.
The progressions of numbers that are 0, 3, or 6 mod 9 contain at most one prime number (the number 3); the remaining progressions of numbers that are 2, 4, 5, 7, and 8 mod 9 have infinitely many prime numbers, with similar numbers of primes in each progression.
However, it does not contain all the prime numbers, since the terms gcd(n + 1, a n) are always odd and so never equal to 2. 587 is the smallest prime (other than 2) not appearing in the first 10,000 outcomes that are different from 1. Nevertheless, in the same paper it was conjectured to contain all odd primes, even though it is rather inefficient.
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 2 p − 1 for some positive integer p. For example, 3 is a Mersenne prime as it is a prime number and is expressible as 2 2 − 1.
The table below lists the largest currently known prime numbers and probable primes (PRPs) as tracked by the PrimePages and by Henri & Renaud Lifchitz's PRP Records. Numbers with more than 2,000,000 digits are shown.
In number theory, primes in arithmetic progression are any sequence of at least three prime numbers that are consecutive terms in an arithmetic progression. An example is the sequence of primes (3, 7, 11), which is given by a n = 3 + 4 n {\displaystyle a_{n}=3+4n} for 0 ≤ n ≤ 2 {\displaystyle 0\leq n\leq 2} .