|
Prime Minister’s Office (Peru)
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways of writing it as a product, or , involve 5 itself. However, 4 is composite because it is a product (2 × 2) in which both numbers are smaller than 4. Primes are central in number theory because of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: every natural number greater than 1 is either a prime itself or can be factorized as a product of primes that is unique up to their order. The property of being prime is called primality. A simple but slow method of checking the primality of a given number , called trial division, tests whether is a multiple of any integer between 2 and . Faster algorithms include the Miller–Rabin primality test, which is fast but has a small chance of error, and the AKS primality test, which always produces ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Euclid's Theorem
Euclid's theorem is a fundamental statement in number theory that asserts that there are Infinite set, infinitely many prime number, prime numbers. It was first proven by Euclid in his work ''Euclid's Elements, Elements''. There are several proofs of the theorem. Euclid's proof Euclid offered a proof published in his work ''Elements'' (Book IX, Proposition 20), which is paraphrased here. Consider any finite list of prime numbers ''p''1, ''p''2, ..., ''p''''n''. It will be shown that there exists at least one additional prime number not included in this list. Let ''P'' be the product of all the prime numbers in the list: ''P'' = ''p''1''p''2...''p''''n''. Let ''q'' = ''P'' + 1. Then ''q'' is either prime or not: *If ''q'' is prime, then there is at least one more prime that is not in the list, namely, ''q'' itself. *If ''q'' is not prime, then some prime factor ''p'' divides ''q''. If this factor ''p'' were in our list, then it wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
