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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
A prime number q is a strong prime if q + 1 and q − 1 both have some large (around 500 digits) prime factors. For a safe prime q = 2p + 1, the number q − 1 naturally has a large prime factor, namely p, and so a safe prime q meets part of the criteria for being a strong prime.
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The reciprocals of prime numbers have been of interest to mathematicians for various reasons. They do not have a finite sum , as Leonhard Euler proved in 1737. Like rational numbers , the reciprocals of primes have repeating decimal representations.