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Concept
Fermat number
Summary
In mathematics, a Fermat number, named after Pierre de Fermat, the first known to have studied them, is a positive integer of the form
where n is a non-negative integer. The first few Fermat numbers are:
3, 5, 17, 257, 65537, 4294967297, 18446744073709551617, ... .
If 2k + 1 is prime and k > 0, then k itself must be a power of 2, so 2k + 1 is a Fermat number; such primes are called Fermat primes. , the only known Fermat primes are F0 = 3, F1 = 5, F2 = 17, F3 = 257, and F4 = 65537 ; heuristics suggest that there are no more.
The Fermat numbers satisfy the following recurrence relations:
for n ≥ 1,
for n ≥ 2. Each of these relations can be proved by mathematical induction. From the second equation, we can deduce Goldbach's theorem (named after Christian Goldbach): no two Fermat numbers share a common integer factor greater than 1. To see this, suppose that 0 ≤ i < j and Fi and Fj have a common factor a > 1. Then a divides both
and Fj; hence a divides their difference, 2. Since a > 1, this forces a = 2. This is a contradiction, because each Fermat number is clearly odd. As a corollary, we obtain another proof of the infinitude of the prime numbers: for each Fn, choose a prime factor pn; then the sequence is an infinite sequence of distinct primes.
No Fermat prime can be expressed as the difference of two pth powers, where p is an odd prime.
With the exception of F0 and F1, the last digit of a Fermat number is 7.
The sum of the reciprocals of all the Fermat numbers is irrational. (Solomon W. Golomb, 1963)
Fermat numbers and Fermat primes were first studied by Pierre de Fermat, who conjectured that all Fermat numbers are prime. Indeed, the first five Fermat numbers F0, ..., F4 are easily shown to be prime. Fermat's conjecture was refuted by Leonhard Euler in 1732 when he showed that
Euler proved that every factor of Fn must have the form k 2n+1 + 1 (later improved to k 2n+2 + 1 by Lucas) for n ≥ 2.
That 641 is a factor of F5 can be deduced from the equalities 641 = 27 × 5 + 1 and 641 = 24 + 54.
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