• ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Yeah, it’s not like the mathematics lost any of the numbers. Get your shit together physicists.

            • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              6 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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                  6 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.

                  • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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                    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. 😊

                • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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                  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. :)

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          Well, either they can’t find everything in that system, or they can also find something that contradicts something else that’s true.

          It balances out, because while there’s infinite facts they can’t prove, there’s also infinite lies they can prove.

      • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        it’s not like the mathematics lost any of the numbers

        show me Pi then

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          Whoa there, if you want it’s physical location you’ll have to ask a physicist, they’re in charge of tangible things.
          Otherwise, just take a turn perpendicular to the reals, or check in the platonic realm.