GRCC Adjunct Mathematics Instructor Dan Garbowitz talks on how prime numbers and perfect numbers have fascinated professional and amateur mathematicians for centuries, and much about them remains unknown. This talk will provides glimpse of the beauty and mysterious nature of these numbers and the relationships between them. Perfect numbers were known to the Greeks and have been studied since at least the 3rd century B.C. Marin Mersenne, a 17th century theologian and mathematician, developed a list of prime numbers, all with the same interesting form. Sometime later, Leonard Euler proved a fascinating statement that related the perfect numbers to the Mersenne Primes. During this seminar we will investigate this theorem in particular, and other number theory topics relating perfect numbers and Mersenne Primes.
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