My understanding is that most (all?) newly-discovered large prime numbers are found via computer programs. I tried reading upon the methodology to find those numbers but I got lost in the mathematical formulas. My guess is it’s not as simple as “find an odd number then start dividing it by all numbers that are approximately 50% of that number or less, and send an alert when you run the whole series and always get remainders.” I mean…that would work but it seems like the slowest and least efficient way to find primes. Is here some way of explaining this that doesn’t rely on me understanding a formula?
In: Mathematics
There are some formulas that can be used to quickly determine if a number is/is not a prime.
Most of the larger primes they are finding are of the form 2^n – 1 (Mersenne primes). They can also use some form of Fermat’s Little Theorem (if p is prime, a^p – a is an integer multiple of p).
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