Tag Archives: lehmer

Over the past couple days we saw that if is composite, then is also composite. Equivalently, this means that if we want to be prime, then at the very least must also be prime. But at this point there is … Continue reading →

Yesterday we saw that must be composite, since . Today I’ll talk about a somewhat more intuitive way to see this. Recall that we can write numbers in base 2, or “binary”, using the digits 0 and 1 (called “bits”, … Continue reading →

The name of the game is to find Mersenne numbers which are also prime. Today, a simple observation: can only be prime when is also prime. Put conversely, if is composite then is also composite. For example, is composite and … Continue reading →

Today, I noticed both Zachary Abel and Qiaochu Yuan plan to write a blog post every day this month (hooray!). I haven’t written on here as much as I would like recently, and so I thought, why not? I already … Continue reading →