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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 because 1 and 5 are its only positive integer factors, whereas 6 is composite because 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. The uniqueness in this theorem requires excluding 1 as a prime because one can include arbitrarily many instances of 1 in any factorization, e.g., 3, 1 · 3, 1 · 1 · 3, etc. are all valid factorizations of 3. The property of being prime (or not) 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 . Algorithms much more efficient than trial division have been devised to test the primality of large numbers. Particularly fast methods are available for numbers of special forms, such as Mersenne numbers. , the largest known prime number has 17,425,170 decimal digits. There are infinitely many primes, as demonstrated by Euclid around 300 BC. There is no known useful formula that sets apart all of the prime numbers from composites. However, the distribution of primes, that is to say, the statistical behaviour of primes in the large, can be modelled. 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 is prime is inversely proportional to its number of digits, or to the logarithm of ''n''. Many questions regarding prime numbers remain open, such as Goldbach's conjecture (that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes), and the twin prime conjecture (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 number (or a prime) if it has exactly two positive divisors, 1 and the number itself.〔, p. 10, section 2〕 Natural numbers greater than 1 that are not prime are called ''composite''. 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: :4 = 2 · 2. 5 is again prime: none of the numbers 2, 3, or 4 divide 5. Next, 6 is divisible by 2 or 3, since :6 = 2 · 3. Hence, 6 is not prime. The image at the right illustrates that 12 is not prime: . No even number greater than 2 is prime because by definition, any such number has at least three distinct divisors, namely 1, 2, and . This implies that is not prime. Accordingly, the term ''odd prime'' refers to any prime number greater than 2. Similarly, when written in the usual decimal system, all prime numbers larger than 5 end in 1, 3, 7, or 9, since even numbers are multiples of 2 and numbers ending in 0 or 5 are multiples of 5. If is a natural number, then 1 and divide without remainder. Therefore, the condition of being a prime can also be restated as: a number is prime if it is greater than one and if none of : divides (without remainder). Yet another way to say the same is: a number is prime if it cannot be written as a product of two integers and , both of which are larger than 1: :. In other words, is prime if items cannot be divided up into smaller equal-size groups of more than one item. The set of all primes is often denoted by . The first 168 prime numbers (all the prime numbers less than 1000) are: :2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, 101, 103, 107, 109, 113, 127, 131, 137, 139, 149, 151, 157, 163, 167, 173, 179, 181, 191, 193, 197, 199, 211, 223, 227, 229, 233, 239, 241, 251, 257, 263, 269, 271, 277, 281, 283, 293, 307, 311, 313, 317, 331, 337, 347, 349, 353, 359, 367, 373, 379, 383, 389, 397, 401, 409, 419, 421, 431, 433, 439, 443, 449, 457, 461, 463, 467, 479, 487, 491, 499, 503, 509, 521, 523, 541, 547, 557, 563, 569, 571, 577, 587, 593, 599, 601, 607, 613, 617, 619, 631, 641, 643, 647, 653, 659, 661, 673, 677, 683, 691, 701, 709, 719, 727, 733, 739, 743, 751, 757, 761, 769, 773, 787, 797, 809, 811, 821, 823, 827, 829, 839, 853, 857, 859, 863, 877, 881, 883, 887, 907, 911, 919, 929, 937, 941, 947, 953, 967, 971, 977, 983, 991, 997 〔 () Clip created on October 22, 2015.〕 . 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「prime number」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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