On 9 March 2015 at 10:31, Dima Pasechnik <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 2015-03-09, John Cremona <[email protected]> wrote:
>> In preparing an example for a course I discovered this seriously
>> misleading feature:
>>
>> sage: n=(10^19-1)/9
>> sage: n.factor()
>> 1111111111111111111
>> sage: n.is_prime()
>> False
>> sage: ZZ(n).is_prime()
>> True
>>
>> What is happening is that when I defined n I used / so that I defined
>> a rational number.  And in QQ, there are no primes.
>>
>> sage: n = (10^19-1)//9
>> sage: n.is_prime()
>> True
>>
>> I don't think there is a good solution for this but surely it will
>> cause confusion (it confused me for at least 5 minutes).
>
> I don't even see the meaning of QQ(n).factor()
> (Prime) factoring in a field is meaningless, IMHO...

Come on, be realistic!  If the firls is the field of fractions of a
UFD then tere is a very well-defined notion of factorization, which is
useful.  I used to get very frustrated with Magma when I asked to
factor the discriminant of an elliptic curve over QQ -- something one
needs to do a lot! -- and it refused because the integral discriminant
had QQ as parent.

In any case, I was just sending out a warning, as this will confuse students:

sage: n = 10/2
sage: n
5
sage: n.is_prime()
False

John

>
> Dima
>
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