A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that cannot be formed by multiplying two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways of writing it as a product, 1 × 5 or 5 × 1, involve 5 itself. However, 6 is composite because it is the product of two numbers (2 × 3) that are both smaller than 6. Primes are central in number theory because of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: every natural number greater than 1 is either a prime itself or can be factorized as a product of primes that is unique up to their order.
source: Wikipedia
Considering a number n we can find out whether it is prime or not applying by the following C++ algorithm:
#include <iostream.h> long int n, prim, d; main() { cin>>n; prim=1; d=2; while (d<=n/2) {if (n%d==0) prim=0; d=d+1; } if (prim==1) cout<<"Yes"; else cout<<"No"; }