this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
1098 points (99.3% liked)

Science Memes

11441 readers
1716 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 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. :)

[–] anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 7 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.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 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. 😊