Historic development of prime numbers

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the history of prime numbers and development of prime number theory. There are three major sections to this thesis, Ancient times, Dark Ages, and Modern times. The ancient time's section has topics on the 'Ishango Bone', 'Rhine Papyrus' with an investigation of Egyptian fractions, and Euclid's Elements where the proof of the existence of an infinite number of primes was first given. The 'Dark Ages' section has topics on non-European mathematicians who worked with prime numbers. The final section covers more modern prime number theory from Gauss, Fermat, Legendre, and Riemann.