This week’s Perl Weekly Challenge, problem 1, reads:

The numbers formed by adding one to the products of the smallest primes are called the Euclid Numbers (see wiki). Write a script that finds the smallest Euclid Number that is not prime. This challenge was proposed by Laurent Rosenfeld.

The first Euclid numbers are 3, 7, and 31.   These are computed as follows:

We’ll take the first three prime numbers – 2, 3, and 5.

The corresponding Euclid number is the prime number multiplied by all the smaller prime numbers, with 1 added to it.

So the first one, 3, is just 2 (nothing to multiply it against) plus 1.

The second one is 3 * 2 plus 1, or 7.

The third one is 5 * 3 *2 + 1, which is 31.

How do you do this in code? Continue reading →