High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In mathematics, the sieve of Atkin is a fast, modern algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to a specified integer. It is an optimized version of the ancient sieve of Eratosthenes, but does some preliminary work and then marks off multiples of primes squared, rather than multiples of primes. It was created by A. O. L. Atkin and Daniel J. Bernstein.