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Part of the book series: Springer Series in Information Sciences ((SSINF,volume 7))

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Abstract

As we go to larger and larger integers, primes become rarer and rarer. Is there a largest prime after which all whole numbers are composite? This sounds counter-intuitive and, in fact, it isn’t true, as Euclid demonstrated a long time ago. Actually, he did it without demonstrating any primes — he just showed that assuming a finite number of primes leads to a neat contradiction.

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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Schroeder, M.R. (1997). Primes. In: Number Theory in Science and Communication. Springer Series in Information Sciences, vol 7. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03430-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03430-9_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-62006-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-03430-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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