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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.
The Ulam spiral or prime spiral is a graphical depiction of the set of prime numbers, devised by mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963 and popularized in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American a short time later. [1] It is constructed by writing the positive integers in a square spiral and specially marking the prime ...
Therefore, every prime number other than 2 is an odd number, and is called an odd prime. [10] Similarly, when written in the usual decimal system, all prime numbers larger than 5 end in 1, 3, 7, or 9. The numbers that end with other digits are all composite: decimal numbers that end in 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8 are even, and decimal numbers that end in ...
If it is 1, then n may be prime. If a n −1 (modulo n) is 1 but n is not prime, then n is called a pseudoprime to base a. In practice, if a n −1 (modulo n) is 1, then n is usually prime. But here is a counterexample: if n = 341 and a = 2, then even though 341 = 11·31 is composite.
Using fast algorithms for modular exponentiation and multiprecision multiplication, the running time of this algorithm is O(k log 2 n log log n) = Õ(k log 2 n), where k is the number of times we test a random a, and n is the value we want to test for primality; see Miller–Rabin primality test for details.
In computational number theory, the Lucas test is a primality test for a natural number n; it requires that the prime factors of n − 1 be already known. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It is the basis of the Pratt certificate that gives a concise verification that n is prime.
Optionally, perform trial division to check if n is divisible by a small prime number less than some convenient limit. Perform a base 2 strong probable prime test. If n is not a strong probable prime base 2, then n is composite; quit. Find the first D in the sequence 5, −7, 9, −11, 13, −15, ... for which the Jacobi symbol (D/n) is −1.
The Mersenne number M 3 = 2 3 −1 = 7 is prime. The Lucas–Lehmer test verifies this as follows. Initially s is set to 4 and then is updated 3−2 = 1 time: s ← ((4 × 4) − 2) mod 7 = 0. Since the final value of s is 0, the conclusion is that M 3 is prime. On the other hand, M 11 = 2047 = 23 × 89 is not prime.