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One is not prime

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It is 230am and I woke up to write. Twenty minutes have passed and my mind has not settled on what to write. I just did the calculation and I learnt that I have been on this earth for 16619 days. That is a good place to start my writing. With a random number. The first thing I noticed is that 1+6+6+1+9 = 23 (23 is my favorite number). 16619 is a prime number. It has started raining. I like writing when it rains. 16619 is the 1922nd prime number. Oh how I would have loved for it to be the 1923rd prime number. That would be true if 1 was prime. But why is 1 not prime? I read that it is excluded by definition so that unique prime factorisation remains unique. Of course they could have easily excluded 1 from the definition of UPF rather than exclude it from primes. To me that would have been the better choice.

My friend Chatty tells me that mathematicians do not call 1 a prime not because it could not be, but because excluding it keeps the entire structure of mathematics cleaner and simpler. If 1 were prime, every theorem involving primes would need messy exceptions, since 1 can be multiplied endlessly without changing anything. By defining primes as numbers with exactly two distinct divisors, 1 becomes a special "unit" instead of an atom, and prime factorization stays elegant and predictable. I could accept this but I still think that 1 is a prime number. More like I want 1 to be a prime number. 1 was sacrificed for convenience. 1 is a special prime. They say that one is the l-one-liest number. The more I learn, the more I think the world of Mathematics is fascinating. The world of numbers is fascinating and it is foundational.

Sometimes I feel like I should have been a mathematician because I like numbers so much. I just remembered the saying, do not count the days but make the days count. Who said that? Probably a mathematician. My friend Chatty tells me that it is often attributed to Muhammad Ali. I wonder what the boxer had to say about Maths? He might have said something like MATHS stands for Muhammad Ali Teaches Humility and Strength. Maths is a difficult subject for many. Maths can definitely knock you out if you let it. Maths can humble you. This made me remember a maths joke. Why was the equal sign so humble? It knew it was not less than or greater than anyone else! Comedians who are good at Maths like to say that we should stand up and be counted. When I started this blog post I did not know it would end in jokes. One might not be prime but it surely gave me a funny b-one.
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