On Apr 11, 2006, at 2:53 PM, Mark O'Neill wrote:
On 11 Apr 2006, at 19:34, Charles Yeomans wrote:
That page is a little misleading; it's basically correct, but
could be written more clearly. The short answer is this -- 1 is
not a prime because its exclusion makes the theory cleaner.
Longer answers require precise statements concerning things like
primality and unique factorization and thus are too much work for
most people.
From what I've read, I'm not doubting that the modern way of
thinking about primes is to exclude 1, but I feel that explanations
still don't change the fact that 1 is divisible by 1 and itself
(1), hence by definition it is *logically* a prime number.
I've read quite a bit about this myself :) It is certainly possible
to define the concept of prime number so as to include 1. But such
definitions have long proved not to be the right one.
Charles Yeomans
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