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 prime and composite numbers. However, the earliest surviving records of the explicit study of prime numbers come from Ancient Greek mathematics. Euclid's "Elements" (circa 300 BC) proves the infinitude of primes and the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, and shows how to construct a perfect number from a Mersenne prime. Another Greek invention, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, is still used to construct lists of primes. Around 1000 AD, the Islamic mathematician Alhazen found Wilson's theorem, characterizing the prime numbers as the numbers formula_1 that evenly divide formula_17. Alhazen also conjectured that all even perfect numbers come from Euclid's construction using Mersenne