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Re: CVS commit: src/games/factor



Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost> writes:

> On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 09:54:49AM +0100, David Laight wrote:
>> The notion of 'primes' is valid in Z - the definition of a prime is a
>> number that has no non-unit factors.
>
> Well, I only took the forced (for CS students) math courses at university,
> and it's been quite some time, but I would have defined a prime as a natural
> number > 1. For what it's worth, wikipedia seems to agree with me ;-)
> (duck)

If everyone followed this approach always, you wouldn't know that zero
is a valid number. For a long time it wasn't so. Any course in history
of mathematics mentions this. The same course most likely mentions Kuhn,
"normal science," groupthink, and other related stuff.

I'm starting to be really afraid of libm project. It involves some quite
fresh results from non-trivial mathematics, some of them were obtained
within recent 5 years.


-- 
HE CE3OH...

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