I have a couple of them myself.
Charles Yeomans
On Apr 11, 2006, at 4:22 PM, Trausti Thor Johannsson wrote:
I did the wise thing, I asked my wife, and she says 1 is prime
number, and everyone knows as unfortunate as it is, the wife is
always correct :)
... and ohh my wife has a degree in math.
Trausti
On Apr 11, 2006, at 9:14 PM, Charles Yeomans wrote:
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.
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode:
<http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/>
Search the archives of this list here:
<http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
