Oh, no that’s just the primes. I was responding to a person joking about how we don’t even know all the primes, so I used a technical yet unhelpful definition of “the set of all primes” to be technically correct,xas is the mathematics way. :)
I don’t know if prime factorization is the correct English word for it but the operation I am referring to takes a (non zero) natural number and returns a multiset of primes that give you the original number when multiplied together.
Example: pf(12)={2,2,3}
if we allowed 1 to be a prime then prime factorization cease to be a function as pf(12)={1,2,2,3} and pf(12)={1,1,1,1,2,2,3} become valid solutions.
1 being prime breaks a lot of the useful properties of primes, such as the uniqueness of prime factorization.
Isn’t that function listing all the numbers? Not only the primes?
Oh, no that’s just the primes. I was responding to a person joking about how we don’t even know all the primes, so I used a technical yet unhelpful definition of “the set of all primes” to be technically correct,xas is the mathematics way. :)
I don’t know if prime factorization is the correct English word for it but the operation I am referring to takes a (non zero) natural number and returns a multiset of primes that give you the original number when multiplied together. Example:
pf(12)={2,2,3}if we allowed 1 to be a prime then prime factorization cease to be a function aspf(12)={1,2,2,3}andpf(12)={1,1,1,1,2,2,3}become valid solutions.