Math – Prime Numbers

I have a fondness for prime numbers and I am not sure why. I guess they are kind of special in a way and even when you get to numbers of larger sizes you can still find prime numbers.

So prime numbers are numbers that can only be divided by themselves and 1. So for example 23 can only be divided by 23 and 1 and nothing else.  With smaller numbers it is relatively easy to tell if a number is prime or not by firstly making sure that it is and odd number and secondly dividing it by other numbers that are less than the square root of that number. However, it gets a bit more tricky once the prime number is higher than 100 or so, if you are trying to do the math in your head.

You can create some algorithms that will sieve out the non-prime numbers and that is the standard way to generate high prime numbers. You can create some basic coding that will generate some prime numbers or you could create a very basic excel spreadsheet.

Interestingly there is no current formula that will provide you with all of the prime numbers, many have tried but none have yet succeeded. prime numbers are fascinating to study and at the moment the largest prime number that has been found has about 13 million digits!

So, a list of all of the prime numbers under 100 follows:

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97

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