Science Memes

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Polisci (mander.xyz)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I mean mathematicians are still missing over 99.999% of prime numbers, so...

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago

They haven't even found more than two factors, one of which is one, for any prime number, either.

Get it together, Mathematicians.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

, or ℙ for short.

I think that should be all of them, but if you want to check, there are references on the website where we keep all the numbers detailing how to check any number, or to list all of them if you want an arbitrarily large pile or have infinite time on your hands. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't that miss out n=1?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

1 being prime breaks a lot of the useful properties of primes, such as the uniqueness of prime factorization.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Isn't that function listing all the numbers? Not only the primes?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

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. :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

You are correct. The person you're replying to misread my set as a fancy way of saying "all natural numbers", not "all primes".
So you're both right, in that if 1 were a prime, the primes would not work right, and if 1 were not a natural number then those would not work right.

Using the totient function to define the set of primes is admittedly basically just using it for the fancy symbol I'll admit, and the better name for where we keep all the primes is the blackboard bold P. 😊

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

The technical term you're looking for is "almost all" prime numbers. Not joking btw.