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Prime Numbers By Becky James Prime Numbers Prime numbers are numbers which have no factors other than 1 and itself. The ancient Chinese discovered the primes, but didn’t really do anything with them. It was only in the Golden Age of the Greeks that the mysteries behind prime numbers were investigated. Euclid in his Elements offered some insight into prime numbers: If you look at the prime numbers between 1and 20… 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19. There are 8, nearly half are prime. Between 20 and 40… 23, 29, 31, 37. There are 4. The number of primes is reducing, so do they eventually dwindle out to nothing? In other words, are there an infinite number of prime numbers? Euclid’s Proof Let’s say there is a finite amount of prime numbers… there must be a largest prime number. Call that number P. That makes our series of prime numbers look like this: 2, 3, 5, 7……. P. If we multiply all of those numbers together, we get…. 2 x 3 x 5 x 7 x……. x P = N Euclid’s Proof N is the product of all the primes. If we now consider N + 1… which numbers are factors? None! 2 is the smallest factor of N, so therefore cannot be a factor of N + 1. That means that N + 1 is prime, since the only other factor can be 1. This means there is an infinite number of prime numbers. The largest prime number to have been calculated has 9.1 million digits! Finding Primes Both Fermat and Mersenne have offered us some techniques for finding the prime numbers. Neither always bring up a prime number, but in the case of Mersenne, his formula leads to finding perfect numbers. Fermat’s formula: 2n + 1 Mersenne’s formula: 2n – 1 We don’t know whether there are an infinite number of Mersenne primes or whether we can achieve an infinite number of primes from Fermat’s Formula. How Many Primes? Gauss noticed, as Euclid did, that the prime numbers begin to dwindle out as we get higher and higher up the number ladder… After lots of calculating and trial and error, Gauss showed that: Density of Pr