Can negative numbers be prime?
No, a prime number is any number greater than one and has only two factors, 1 and itself. Here is a description of why this is true. This is an excellent question, but in order to understand the answer, you have to get a feel for what mathematics is about. It’s not about cranking numbers through equations and getting answers, and it’s not about balancing your checkbook or figuring out how long it will take Bill and Janet to mow the lawn if they work together, and it’s not about building bridges or telephones or sending spaceships to other planets. Those are all _uses_ of math, but mathematics itself is about searching for patterns. The most interesting patterns are the ones that hold for the largest classes of numbers. So something that is true for all numbers is more interesting than something that is true for just integers, or just prime numbers, or just numbers smaller than 10, or just the number 17. (Note that ‘patterns’ are sometimes called ‘theorems,’ and sometimes called ‘proper
That actually depends on which definition of “prime” you use. In math “prime” can be defined in different ways. If we’re talking about positive integers, then prime is often defined as “a number greater than 1 that has no factors other than itself and one” However, if you delve deeper into math, in particular, into unique factorization domains, “prime” is defined as “A nonzero nonunit element p of an integral domain D with the property that p divides ab implies that p divdes a and/or p divides b is a prime” For this definition you also need to know that a unit is a number which divides into 1. “a divides into b” is defined as “there exists a number n in D with na = b” Under this defintion and the integral domain of the integers, then 2 and -2 are both prime. In math, you can usually tell by the context whether the negative primes are regarded as prime or not. EDIT: I should make it clear that the well known definition ONLY applies if you are talking about positive integers. If you intr
