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Re: prime numbers and African artifact
Lawrence Pepper (pepper@pegasus.ncsl.nist.gov)
12 Jul 1995 16:32:03 GMT
henry@netcom.com (Henry Polard) wrote:
>In article <3tso8h$giu@netaxs.com>, Michael Hyman <mikeh@netaxs.com> wrote:
>>Rick Hawkins (rhawkins@iastate.edu) wrote:
>>: >> Prime numbers are those numbers which can NOT be divided evenly by
>>: >> another whole number... 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31...
>>
>>: >Hurrah!
>>: But only half- credit, since it's the wrong answer. 1 is not prime.
>>
>>On a related topic, the binary system has the interesting property that
>>all numbers which end in 1 are prime: 001, 011, 101, 111, ...
>
>Going further, the next number that ends in 1 is 1001 = 9, which is
>3 times 3, and therefore not prime.
>
What are you talking about? 3 is most definitely prime (it doesn't
divide into 2 or 5 and is greater than pi) so 9 is not only prime
but its prime _squared_! You people should think before you post!
..Oh, and another thing...
>Perhaps you meant to say that in the binary system, all numbers
>that end in 1 are odd?
>
.. binary is base 2 which is even (2 is one less than 3, which is prime,
see above) so how can any number base 2 be odd? A little thought would
save a lot of people a whole bunch of time.
Lawrence "the only thing odd about 3 is that
it's curlier than most other numbers" Pepper
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