• anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 months ago

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

          • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            4 months ago

            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.