Prime 1: The Forgotten Foundation
06 Aug 2025
For centuries, mathematics has hidden its most important foundation in plain sight. Quietly, we have set 1 aside from the sequence of prime numbers. By convention for the past 100 years (and a good percentage of the last 2,500 years), the primes begin with 2. That exclusion was never a law of nature. It was a convenience — a way to preserve the tidy elegance of unique factorization. Yet by removing 1, we buried the most fundamental generator of number itself, the seed from which all other structure grows.