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 limit of the "difference" of the two functions as increases without bound. Instead, the theorem states that approximates in the sense that the relative error of this approximation approaches 0 as increases without bound. The prime number theorem is equivalent to the statement that the th prime number satisfies the asymptotic notation meaning, again, that the relative error of this approximation approaches 0 as increases without bound. For example, the th prime number is , and ()log() rounds to , a relative error of about 6.4%. The prime number theorem is also equivalent to where and are the first and