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 a special form, including the special number field sieve. the largest number known to have been factored by a general-purpose algorithm is RSA-768, which has 232 decimal digits (768 bits) and is the product of two large primes. Shor's algorithm can factor any integer in a polynomial number of steps on a quantum computer. However, current technology can only run this algorithm for very small numbers. the largest number that has been factored by a quantum computer running Shor's algorithm is 21. Several public-key cryptography algorithms, such as RSA and the Diffie–Hellman key exchange, are based on large prime numbers