04-07-2012, 02:57 PM
Prime number
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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, as only 1 and 5 divide it, whereas 6 is composite, since 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. This theorem requires excluding 1 as a prime.
The property of being prime 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 √n. Algorithms that are much more efficient than trial division have been devised to test the primality of large numbers. Particularly fast methods are available for primes of special forms, such as Mersenne primes. As of 2011, the largest known prime number has nearly 13 million decimal digits.
There are infinitely many primes, as demonstrated by Euclid around 300 BC. There is no known useful formula that yields all of the prime numbers and no composites. However, the distribution of primes, that is to say, the statistical behaviour of primes in the large, can be modeled. 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 the logarithm of n.
Many questions around prime numbers remain open, such as Goldbach's conjecture, which asserts that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes, and the twin prime conjecture, which says 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.
Definition and examples
A natural number (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.) is called a prime or a prime number if it is greater than 1 and has exactly two divisors, 1 and the number itself. Natural numbers greater than 1 that are not prime are called composite.
The number 12 is not a prime, as 12 items can be placed into 3 equal-size columns of 4 each (among other ways). 11 items cannot be all placed into several equal-size columns of more than 1 item each, there will always be some extra items left (a remainder). Therefore the number 11 is a prime.
Among the numbers 1 to 6, the numbers 2, 3, and 5 are the prime numbers, while 1, 4, and 6 are not prime. 1 is excluded as a prime number, for reasons explained below. 2 is a prime number, since the only natural numbers dividing it are 1 and 2. Next, 3 is prime, too: 1 and 3 do divide 3 without remainder, but 3 divided by 2 gives remainder 1. Thus, 3 is prime. However, 4 is composite, since 2 is another number (in addition to 1 and 4) dividing 4 without remainder:
Number of prime numbers
There are infinitely many prime numbers. Another way of saying this is that the sequence
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, ...
of prime numbers never ends. This statement is referred to as Euclid's theorem in honor of the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, since the first known proof for this statement is attributed to him. Many more proofs of the infinitude of primes are known, including an analytical proof by Euler, Goldbach's proof based on Fermat numbers,[11] Fürstenberg's proof using general topology,[12] and Kummer's elegant proof.[13]
Distribution
In 1975, number theorist Don Zagier commented that primes both
“ grow like weeds among the natural numbers, seeming to obey no other law than that of chance [but also] exhibit stunning regularity [and] that there are laws governing their behavior, and that they obey these laws with almost military precision. ”
The distribution of primes in the large, such as the question how many primes are smaller than a given, large threshold, is described by the prime number theorem, but no efficient formula for the n-th prime is known.