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 .)
Strong prime and 19, add up to 32, and half that is 16; 17 is greater than 16, and so 17 is a strong prime. The first few strong primes are In a twin prime pair ("p", "p" + 2) with "p" > 5, "p" is always a strong prime, since 3 must divide "p" − 2, which cannot be prime. It is possible for a prime to be a strong prime both in the cryptographic sense and the number theoretic sense. For the sake of illustration, 439351292910452432574786963588089477522344331 is a strong prime in the number theoretic sense because the arithmetic mean of