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 so is every element in the sequence. Therefore, this progression contains only one prime number, 3 itself. In general, the infinite progression can have more than one prime only when its remainder formula_34 and modulus formula_107 are relatively prime. If they are relatively prime, Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions asserts that the progression contains infinitely many primes. The Green–Tao theorem shows that there are arbitrarily long finite arithmetic progressions consisting only of primes. Euler noted that the function yields prime numbers for formula_109, although composite numbers appear among its later values. The search for an explanation for this phenomenon led