A glance at the prime number sequence
One of the glories of numbers is so self-evident that it may easily be overlooked–every one of them is unique. Each number has its own structure, its own character ifyou like, and the personality of individual numbers is important because when a particular number arises, its nature has consequences for the structure of the collection to which that number applies. There are also relationships between numbers that reveal themselves when we carry out the fundamental number operations of addition and multiplication. Clearly any counting number greater than 1 can be expressed as the sum of smaller numbers. However, when we start multiplying numbers together, we soon notice that there are some numbers that never turn up as the answer to our sums. These numbers are theprimes and they represent the building blocks of multiplication.