What's your favorite even prime number?

[Wonk]

Poll question: What's your favorite even prime number?

[Terwilliger]

1. duh-HIL!

;-)

[pnorman]

2. There is no such thing as an "even prime number"!!

n/t

[FlashHarry]

3. Isn't 2 a prime?

It's only divisible by 1 and itself.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

4. I think the aforementioned "2" qualifies n/t

[pnorman]

8. Sheesh!!

You're RIGHT!! ... I was going by aging (73 yr. old) memory. I hsd just a few minutes ago installed a Websters unabridged dictionary in my PDA, but was too smug to look it up.

And since TWO is the ONLY even prime number, I guess it's my favorite too.

[DUreader]

5. God told me that infinity is an even number and also prime

faith based math strikes again!

[blondeatlast]

6. Tough choice, but I picked 2.

As I study for the GRE; am I out of my mind to go to grad school?

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!

[Interrobang]

11. Studying for the GRE, are you?

So am I. Yeah, you're nuts to want to go to grad school; I've been once already, and I'm nuts to want to go back, especially to a f*cked-up country where they make you take a standardized test run by a private, for-profit company to get into school, for chrissakes. (I've already got a Master's degree, what do they want, blood?) See, grad school is like this: You lose 30 IQ points per lecture (especially if they're those bitchin' 3hr ones), and get 29 back by the next day. If you're lucky, you get all of them back over the weekends, but don't count on it. So you kind of come out the other end a blithering idiot. You're an *educated* blithering idiot, but you still feel like you just got paroled from the Home For the Terminally Unstable. :)

Bonne chance!

[starroute]

7. Does -2 count?

If it does, I vote for it!

[BrotherBuzz]

9. I always choose the answer in the middle...

odd!

[SmileyBoy]

10. KEY-urr.

Is my favourite.

[populistmom]

12. Da, Sarah! (I missed the EVEN part)

Uh, I guess it would have to be two then as opposed to my original 31. :dunce:

Sarah

[TrogL]

13. sqrt(2)

Should be prime, shouldn't it?

[SadEagle]

15. It depends.

On where you're located. It doesn't make sense to ask the question in integers --
there is no square root of 2 there, while in real numbers, it's not prime, but it's not composite either -- in R, every element has an inverse, so you can't really talk about factoring it. Of course, if you're talking about primes and stuff in places other than the integers, weird things happen -- you might not have unique factorization, and while in integers the property that something can't be non-trivially factored is equivalent to that if a products is divisible by it, one of the components is, that doesn't hold in other places. So anyway, I almost convinced myself to take an algebraic number theory course one of those days, as it studies that stuff in detail, and my BG is from more general abstract algebra.

And anyway, there is more to the question than it immediately obvious -- 2 really does behave sometimes quite differently, there are some properties that are stated in terms of something like "if it's a power of an odd prime, twice a power of an odd prime, 2 or 4"

[TrogL]

16. I don't believe in integers

two plus two approaches the value of four

[SadEagle]

17. Bad idea.

Unfortunately, integers show up in a rather ungainly number of places, and are rather fundamental. Once you get addition and subtraction, you either get them, or a folded up copy. So 2+2 is always 4, although sometimes 4 is 0, 1, or 2 (abstract algebra is fun because of stuff like that -- you're constly saying stuff like "unless 0 equals 1").
Now transcedental numbers -- you have to be one of those crazy geometry or analysis people to believe in them :-)

[JVS]

14. Gotta go with 2 because there are no other even primes

[TheZoo]

18. Two is too easy...

I'd go with 2^6972593-1, all 2098960 digits of it.

Or maybe 2^13466917-1, all 4053946 digits of it; I don't think it's been confirmed yet.