Java program to check if a number is prime or not

Given a positive integer, check if the number is prime or not. A prime is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. Examples of first few prime numbers are {2, 3, 5,

Examples :

Input:  n = 11
Output: true

Input:  n = 15
Output: false

Input:  n = 1
Output: false

School Method
A simple solution is to iterate through all numbers from 2 to n-1 and for every number check if it divides n. If we find any number that divides, we return false.

// A school method based JAVA program
// to check if a number is prime
class GFG {

    static boolean isPrime(int n)
    {
        // Corner case
        if (n <= 1)
            return false;

        // Check from 2 to n-1
        for (int i = 2; i < n; i++)
            if (n % i == 0)
                return false;

        return true;
    }

    // Driver Program
    public static void main(String args[])
    {
        if (isPrime(11))
            System.out.println(" true");
        else
            System.out.println(" false");
        if (isPrime(15))
            System.out.println(" true");
        else
            System.out.println(" false");
    }
}

Output:

true
 false

Time complexity of this solution is O(n)

Optimized School Method
We can do following optimizations:

1. Instead of checking till n, we can check till √n because a larger factor of n must be a multiple of smaller factor that has been already checked.
2. The algorithm can be improved further by observing that all primes are of the form 6k ± 1, with the exception of 2 and 3. This is because all integers can be expressed as (6k + i) for some integer k and for i = ?1, 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4; 2 divides (6k + 0), (6k + 2), (6k + 4); and 3 divides (6k + 3). So a more efficient method is to test if n is divisible by 2 or 3, then to check through all the numbers of form 6k ± 1. (Source: wikipedia)

// A optimized school method based Java
// program to check if a number is prime
import java.io.*;

class GFG {

    static boolean isPrime(int n)
    {
        // Corner cases
        if (n <= 1)
            return false;
        if (n <= 3)
            return true;

        // This is checked so that we can skip
        // middle five numbers in below loop
        if (n % 2 == 0 || n % 3 == 0)
            return false;

        for (int i = 5; i * i <= n; i = i + 6)
            if (n % i == 0 || n % (i + 2) == 0)
                return false;

        return true;
    }

    // Driver Program
    public static void main(String args[])
    {
        if (isPrime(11))
            System.out.println(" true");
        else
            System.out.println(" false");
        if (isPrime(15))
            System.out.println(" true");
        else
            System.out.println(" false");
    }
}
Output:

true
 false

Time complexity of this solution is O(√n)

Main Article : Primality Test | Set 1 (Introduction and School Method)

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number
http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/manindra/presentations/FLTBasedTests.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primality_test

This article is contributed by Ajay. Please write comments if you find anything incorrect, or you want to share more information about the topic discussed above