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On The Mersenne Prime Numbers, Julia Vanlandingham

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

The prime numbers have been an important field of research for thousands of years and are intertwined with most other fields of mathematics. One topic that has piqued the interest of mathematicians young and old is the Mersenne prime numbers, which have applications in many mathematics and computer science fields. The Mersenne primes get a lot of attention because there is not much known about them. However, we do have a very simple primality test for Mersenne numbers, which is why the largest currently known primes are Mersenne primes. These primes are also very closely related to another class of …