A Baltimore rabbi once joked that he almost became a disbeliever from driving throughOregon. Torah tells us that everything that Hashem created has a purpose even every single leaf on every tree. The rabbi said that for hundreds of miles along the Interstate he passed an uncountable number of trees — how could each leaf have a purpose in the great scheme of the world?
The same thing could be said about many curiosities with which mathematicians amused themselves for ages.
Mathematicians have always been fascinated by numbers. Of course numbers are important for we could not manage our lives without them but mathematicians were generally not concerned with usefulness; they studied numbers purely for their own sake. One of the most fascinating albeit seemingly useless studies was that of “prime numbers.”
The number 6 is equal to 2 multiplied by 3. Because it can be written as the product of two numbers it is called a composite number. Similarly 12 which is the product of 2 x 2 x 3 is also a composite number. The numbers 5 or 11 however cannot be divided into products of other numbers. They are called prime numbers.
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