[pehrlich]

wow, that is very nice. Does anyone else think they notice that primes are near to highly divisible numbers?

[recursive]

That does make a certain amount of intuitive sense, in rough terms. In a certain "region" of the integral number line, based on the magnitude of the contained numbers, we expect a certain total number of prime factors. It makes sense that highly composite numbers might be near by primes in order to "balance out".

None of this is rigorous, but I think contains some intuition with a kernel of truth.

[zipdog]

I recall a successful 'highest prime' search using a system that checked numbers of the form 2^n - 1 (or something like that)

[acoster]

Those are called Mersenne Primes, and are in the form 2^p - 1, where p is a prime number.