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 quadratic polynomial that (for integer arguments) is prime infinitely often. Euler's proof that there are infinitely many primes considers the sums of reciprocals of primes, Euler showed that, for any arbitrary real number formula_22, there exists a prime formula_20 for which this sum is bigger than formula_22. This shows that there are infinitely many primes, because if there were finitely many primes the sum would reach its maximum value at the biggest prime rather than growing past every formula_22. The growth rate of this sum is described more precisely by Mertens' second theorem. For comparison, the sum does not