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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 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.
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.
Because the set of primes is a computably enumerable set, by Matiyasevich's theorem, it can be obtained from a system of Diophantine equations. Jones et al. (1976) found an explicit set of 14 Diophantine equations in 26 variables, such that a given number k + 2 is prime if and only if that system has a solution in nonnegative integers: [7]
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.
Ω(n), the prime omega function, is the number of prime factors of n counted with multiplicity (so it is the sum of all prime factor multiplicities). A prime number has Ω(n) = 1. The first: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37 (sequence A000040 in the OEIS). There are many special types of prime numbers. A composite number has Ω(n) > 1.
Another example is the distribution of the last digit of prime numbers. Except for 2 and 5, all prime numbers end in 1, 3, 7, or 9. Dirichlet's theorem states that asymptotically, 25% of all primes end in each of these four digits.
In number theory, the home prime HP(n) of an integer n greater than 1 is the prime number obtained by repeatedly factoring the increasing concatenation of prime factors including repetitions. The mth intermediate stage in the process of determining HP(n) is designated HPn(m). For instance, HP(10) = 773, as 10 factors as 2×5 yielding HP10(1 ...