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The Mersenne primesĪfter the Greeks, interest in prime numbers was only revived at the end of the Middle Ages.
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A century later, another Greek mathematician, Eratosthenes, created a screening method that allows all the prime numbers of a limited list to be identified, simply by crossing out multiples. demonstrated for the first time that prime numbers are infinite. The first known person to look specifically at this subject was the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, who around 300 B.C. A young child can understand what makes a number prime, yet lifetimes of mathematical research have been spent trying to solve some of the problems in the field.” In fact, this apparent simplicity is part of its appeal, according to what Adrian Dudek, a mathematician from Australian National University, tells OpenMind: “I think the fascination for prime numbers comes from the fact that they are so elementary in description but yet incredibly difficult to analyse. The definition of a prime number is so simple that it is learned in primary school: it is that natural number greater than 1 that can only be divided exactly by 1 and by itself.
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But what is the point of hunting for ever-larger prime numbers? The mathematic papyrus of Amhes. The data is often cited as a sign that the knowledge and search for these peculiar numbers are almost as old as human thought, a search that has reached almost inconceivable heights in the last couple of decades. More than 3,550 years ago, an Egyptian scribe named Ahmes wrote a papyrus on which he recorded differently those fractions whose denominators were prime numbers.