Mersenne prime Mersenne prime In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form for some integer . They are named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th century. The exponents which give Mersenne primes are 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, ... and the resulting Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, 127, 8191, 131071, 524287, 2147483647, ... . If is a composite number then so is . ( is divisible by both and .)
Prime number theorem column, , is the average prime gap below . The value for was originally computed assuming the Riemann hypothesis; it has since been verified unconditionally. There is an analogue of the prime number theorem that describes the "distribution" of irreducible polynomials over a finite field; the form it takes is strikingly similar to the case of the classical prime number theorem. To state it precisely, let be the finite field with elements, for some fixed , and let be the number of monic "irreducible" polynomials over whose degree is equal to . That is, we are looking at polynomials with