All About Prime Numbers!
This is another excellent university resource, based at the University of Tennessee at Martin by Professor Chris Caldwell. It's all about prime numbers- those special numbers that make possible encryption and e-commerce and provide mathematicians with lots to conjecture, postulate, hypothesise and discuss. A prime number is one that can only by divided by itself or 1 (with no remainder left over). So that excludes all even numbers (except 2) as they can all be divided by 2. 3 is prime, as is 5 and 7 but not 9 as it can be divided by 3, likewise 13 is, 15 isn't etc. There are very many primes but no easy formula to work out when they occur (though there are some approximate methods but NOT exact).
There is an ongoing search to find the largest known prime. There is of course no largest prime, just as there is no largest number. This site includes the first 15 million primes plus the 5,000 largest, curios plus hundreds of links.
If you have an interest in maths, this site is highly recommended.
Posted: January 25th, 2007 under default.
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