Prime Numbers, which most people remember from school, are numbers which are not divisible by anything. A number like 17 can’t be made up of two smaller numbers multiplied together. But 15 can be written as 3 times 5, so it’s not a prime number.<\/p>\n Mathematicians are constantly having to go back to understanding the primes, because primes build numbers, from numbers you get mathematics, from mathematics you get the whole of science. Quite often a mathematician will be exploring a subject and will find they need to find out more about the primes to make progress.<\/p>\n Did you know that prime numbers are fundamental now to the codes that protect our privacy on the Internet? Every time you send your credit card details to a shop online, we’re using prime numbers to keep that information secure. Currently we rely on the fact that we don’t understand the primes well enough to crack the encryption.<\/p>\n![\"Euclid](\"\/pics\/euclid.jpg\")
Last month a team of researchers in Missouri successfully calculated the highest latest prime number and it is 9.1 million digits long<\/a>. For nearly two and a half thousand years since Euclid first described the prime numbers in his book “Elements<\/a>“<\/em>, mathematicians have struggled to write a rule to predict what comes next in the sequence. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler feared that it’s a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate. ![\"Riemann's](\"\/pics\/zeta-function.jpg\")
But others have been more hopeful. In the middle of the 19th century, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann discovered the connection between prime numbers and a complex mathematical function called the Zeta function<\/a>. Ever since, mathematicians have laboured to prove the existence of this connection and reveal the rules behind the elusive sequence.<\/p>\nWhat are prime numbers and what is their significance?<\/h4>\n
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They are so important to many mathematicians because they are the building blocks of all numbers. So if you take any number, it can be built by multiplying these prime numbers together. So a number like 105 is built by multiplying 3 x 5 x 7. So the primes are like the atoms of arithmetic – the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of mathematics. They are a little bit like the Periodic Table for a mathematician.<\/p>\n