A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a

product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not
prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways
of writing it as a product, 1 × 5 or 5 × 1, involve 5 itself. However, 4 is
composite because it is a product (2 × 2) in which both numbers are smaller than 4.
Primes are central in number theory because of the fundamental theorem of
arithmetic: every natural number greater than 1 is either a prime itself or can be
factorized as a product of primes that is unique up to their order.

The property of being prime is called primality. A simple but slow method of
checking the primality of a given number {\displaystyle n}n, called trial division,
tests whether {\displaystyle n}n is a multiple of any integer between 2 and
{\displaystyle {\sqrt {n}}}{\sqrt {n}}. Faster algorithms include the Miller–Rabin
primality test, which is fast but has a small chance of error, and the AKS
primality test, which always produces the correct answer in polynomial time but is
too slow to be practical. Particularly fast methods are available for numbers of
special forms, such as Mersenne numbers. As of December 2018 the largest known
prime number is a Mersenne prime with 24,862,048 decimal digits[1].

There are infinitely many primes, as demonstrated by Euclid around 300 BC. No known
simple formula separates prime numbers from composite numbers. However, the
distribution of primes within the natural numbers in the large can be statistically
modelled. The first result in that direction is the prime number theorem, proven at
the end of the 19th century, which says that the probability of a randomly chosen
number being prime is inversely proportional to its number of digits, that is, to
its logarithm.

Several historical questions regarding prime numbers are still unsolved. These
include Goldbach's conjecture, that every even integer greater than 2 can be
expressed as the sum of two primes, and the twin prime conjecture, that there are
infinitely many pairs of primes having just one even number between them. Such
questions spurred the development of various branches of number theory, focusing on
analytic or algebraic aspects of numbers. Primes are used in several routines in
information technology, such as public-key cryptography, which relies on the
difficulty of factoring large numbers into their prime factors. In abstract
algebra, objects that behave in a generalized way like prime numbers include prime
elements and prime ideals.