A prime number is any number that can be divided only by 1 and itself. For example, 3 is a prime number because the only numbers that divide it are 1 and 3. The number 4 is not, because it can be divided by 1, 2, and 4. The prime numbers are sometimes called the chemical elements of the numbers, because any integer can be expressed as a product of primes. The number 100 is not a prime, because it is divisible by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, and 50, but it can be expressed as 2 * 2 * 5 * 5.
Although prime numbers seem simple, some of their properties are still the subject of great mathematical interest. One problem that has occupied mathematicians is the twin prime conjecture, which states that there are infinitely many primes that differ by 2 (e.g., 3 and 5, 17 and 19, and 29 and 31). Such primes appear less often as numbers get larger (e.g., 18,408,989 and 18,408,991 are primes, with the next twin primes being 18,409,199 and 18,409,201), but the conjecture posits that they do not entirely disappear. There is no last twin prime. However, the twin prime conjecture is a conjecture, which means that mathematicians suspect it to be true but have not proved it. In 2013, Yitang Zhang made a great breakthrough when he proved that there were infinitely many primes that differ by 70 million. That number is a long way from 2, but it is much better than infinity, which is where the conjecture was before. Subsequent work has since improved on Zhang’s work, so it is known that there are infinitely many primes that differ by 246.
One special kind of prime has been intensively researched. The Mersenne primes take the form 2^n – 1 where n is an integer. The first Mersenne prime is 3 = 2^2 – 1; the next is 7 = 2^3 – 1. However, they then begin to thin out. The next Mersenne primes are 31; 127; 8,191; and 131,071. Only 49 Mersenne primes are known. The 15 most recently discovered Mersenne primes have been found as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed computing project. The most-recent discovery was in January 2016, when it was found that 2^74,207,281 – 1 was prime. That number has 22,338,618 digits and is the largest-known prime number.
Numbers and Mathematics